


Plasticity

by HigharollaKockamamie



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: AU, Age Difference, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Foursome, Kink Meme, M/M, Slow Romance, two guys are sort of spiritually related through a lesbian AI and I don't even know how to tag that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-14
Updated: 2017-03-03
Packaged: 2018-05-06 17:06:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 29,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5425037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HigharollaKockamamie/pseuds/HigharollaKockamamie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For a kink meme prompt. The three men in charge of Shadow Moses start to take notice of one of their engineers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. [1] Commander

“It's expensive.” 

“It has to be,” Hal said. “All of the weight is going to get carried on those joints. They have to be able to take a lot of torsional stress. If we cut corners on the alloy, you risk damage every time it has to make a quick turn.”

Commander Miller frowned at the requisitions sheet. It was no use trying to get anything unnecessary past him. He was as strict with the R&D Department as he was with the recruits, though at least they didn't have to run laps with him yelling _Come on boys, I'm twice your age and I have half your limbs!_

“All right,” the Commander said. He signed with a pen perched between his metal fingers and tucked the clipboard under his arm. “Have the details on my desk by tomorrow.”

“Yes sir.” Lists of numbers were scrolling through Hal's head. Miller was a few steps away when he remembered, “Oh, Commander.”

He stopped and turned back. “Hm?”

Hal gestured toward his right arm. “Your finger. It looks like there's some delay on the movement.” 

“Oh, that.” In Miller's dismissive gesture, the little finger straightened a half-second slower than the others. “It's been doing that for a few days now. I'll get it fixed in the next round of maintenance.” 

“If it's what I'm thinking, it'd only take a second.” Hal pushed his glasses up. “I'm no expert or anything, but I could take a look at it for you.” 

Miller looked at him for what felt like a long time. It was hard to gauge his expression through the dark sunglasses. Hal watched his own hazed, gray reflection. The level of chatter in the workroom eased down, and he could feel other eyes accumulating on them. 

“Fine,” Miller said. As soon as he turned, a lot of heads went back down to their workstations. He raised his silver hand to him without looking back. “I'll come by when I'm done with this paperwork.” 

Hal had almost forgotten about it by then. He'd gotten caught up in working out some calculations about the balance when the sound of a cleared throat made him jump. At some point the big, open room had gotten very quiet. No voices or clack of keys, just the subaudible buzz of the fluorescent lights. The Commander loomed over him, and that was when it occurred to Hal that calling his attention down on himself may have not been such a great idea.

“Evening, Doctor Emmerich.” Miller held his arm out and curled the fingers in sequence. The movements were just slightly too quick and precise to match the natural. “Changed your mind?”

There it was. The halt in the little finger. Hal could picture, clear as day, where it would be coming from. A circuit diagram flashed into his mind, and he forgot there was anything to worry about.

“No,” he said. “Here, let me see.” 

They needed some room for this. Hal pushed some scattered pens and post-its, calculator, and other things – not even that many other things, and it was just a little figurine, if Courtney could have a calendar full of firemen he could have _one_ EMPS – out of the way to clear off his desk. While he dug in a drawer for the set of tools he knew was in there somewhere, Miller shrugged his coat off and hung it over the back of a chair. He looked different without it. Not really smaller so much as a human shape instead of a wall. You could see that the broadness was in his shoulders, not just the cut. Above his shirt collar, the stubble on his throat was dark blond. He took off the jacket under it, and unbuttoned his sleeve. It was strange to see something as ordinary as the cuff of a dress shirt rolled up over the silver prosthetic. He sat on the other side of Hal's desk and laid his arm over it, palm up.

There was something strangely personal about removing an access panel when it was on someone's wrist. It ran all along Miller's inner arm, almost to his inner elbow. A coffee cup collected the tiny screws. 

Hal's eyes flicked up to the commander's face. He had a feeling he was watching him, not the work. “That doesn't hurt or anything, does it?”

“No.” Then again, he might have been looking at the delicate screwdriver fitting into place. “It has sensors for heat and pressure, but not pain.”

Hal lifted the panel away. For a moment, he had to stop with the screwdriver dangling between his fingertips. Underneath the smooth silver it was a dense mass of cords and metal, like he'd unlocked a door in a blank wall that opened into a jungle. 

“This is incredible. Look at that...” The black cords ran like tendons, with a few red and yellow twisting through, in and out of hiding. The dense layers of components reminded him of a Pollack painting. “Who made this?” 

“An old friend in Afghanistan came up with the initial design. The boys in biotech have been tinkering with it ever since.”

“Hm.” Hal leaned over the table and peered closely. He could have explored for hours, but he had a job to do. “Flex your fingers for me.” 

The inner structure shifted to pull the joints into curls. The thin cords flexed and tightened, and Hal broke into a smile. “Got it,” he said, with his voice full of satisfaction. His tools dove inward toward the component out of sync.“Just as I thought. It's this connection, here. This design is amazingly durable, but with all the activity you put it through, sooner or later something's going to come loose, especially if it's dealing with a lot of quick, jarring impacts. It's almost like Rex's legs, in the general principle. Except a lot smaller, and, uh, attached to a person.” 

He broke off, and saw Miller watching him steadily. Wisps of blond hair from under his hat and curled above the sunglasses. Hal had gotten a little caught up and forgotten that the part he understood ended at the shoulder. 

He pushed up his glasses with the hand not currently holding a pair of tweezers in his boss's forearm. “Anyway, it's--” 

“Doctor Emmerich.” 

Nearly dropping a pair of tweezers in his boss's forearm. “Yeah?” 

The lenses of the sunglasses had a sort of cloudy pattern on them. Hal had never noticed that before. 

“I know you have an ulterior motive.”

“Oh.” Hal smiled sheepishly and unhooked one of the fine cords. “I guess it's pretty obvious, huh? I've been wanting to get an up-close look at this ever since I first saw it. Civilian models are decades away from anything like this. Oh, here we go.” The end clicked into place. “Try it now.” 

For a second he thought Miller hadn't heard him. He must have been getting used to the idea of moving it while the musculature was showing. When he curled his fingers, they moved in fluid unison.

“There,” Hal said. He smiled in satisfaction as he started putting everything back together. “You should take it in for more thorough maintenance when you get the chance, but that'll hold it for the time being. It really is a beautiful piece of work. It must have taken a lot of getting used to, though.”

“Not as much as you'd think,” said Miller. His voice was more relaxed and conversational, without the hard, commanding edge it usually had. Probably because it was outside the normal day's work, and now he knew Hal wasn't just poking around blindly. And that lag must have been driving him crazy. “Have you ever heard of something called homuncular flexibility? The brain's sense of its own body isn't set in stone. The body schema – that is to say, your sense of where you are - changes depending on what you see and feel.”

The cover fit back into place over his forearm and put the metal and cords back into hiding. Hal twisted a tiny screw into place.

Miller leaned back in his chair, gesturing with his other arm. “It even goes for something like video games. People react to the figure on the screen as though it's a part of themselves. Some interesting implications when it comes to VR, there. But compared to identifying with a flat picture on a screen, a solid limb in the real world is simple. You could do it.”

“I'd, uh, rather keep mine...” 

The ghost of a smile touched Miller's lips. “That's not what I meant. Here. Close that up and I'll show you.” 

Hal barely had the last screw settled home when Miller got up. He flexed his hand, nodded to himself in approval at the seamless motion, and gestured to Hal to stand. He did, feeling awkward now that he didn't have a tool in his hand and something to focus on. Miller walked behind him, close.

“Like this.” Miller's hand took his. For an instant all he could think of was the doll getting crushed in a cyborg's grip from the opening of Ghost in the Shell, but the touch was light. 

He laid his whole arm over Hal's. The metal was as cool and smooth as Rex's skin. The seams and rivets on his palm made a map of sensation on the back of his hand, and the joints were too finely fitted to pinch. His own arm was hidden by silver musculature. Through the fabric of Miller's shirt, above the border marked by his rolled sleeve, he could feel the place near the shoulder where metal became flesh. There was a faint scent of cologne. 

“This is your hand,” Miller said by his ear. “These are your fingers.”

Hal looked down at the gleaming arm engulfing his. “I don't think that's going to work.” 

“Try.”

It was a strange thing to think about. Pretending to have a cybernetic limb wasn't a simple optical illusion like seeing a duck one way and a rabbit the other. He tried to concentrate.

“Move your thumb.” When he did, it was the artificial one on top that lifted. “That's right. Now your fingers, one at a time.” 

As he did, he watched the metal ones dip down in sequence. Miller must have been able to feel the pressure, like he said, and move with him. The metal was warming up against his skin. 

“Feels strange,” he murmured, fascinated. Index, middle, ring, little finger, one by one and back again, like playing a scale. 

“It's called the body transfer illusion.” Miller's voice kept time with the motion. “If a physical stimulus happens to your own limb and something that resembles it at the same time, the premotor cortex can be tricked into reacting as though it's your own.”

Quicker than he thought possible, the knowledge that the movement was an indirect reaction smoothed away, and it really was as though he was moving the metal himself. He closed it into a loose fist and opened it again, and felt the satisfaction when the little finger moved in sync. “I think I'm getting it.”

He felt the motion as Miller nodded. “Sight and feeling have a way of undercutting what you know. Even our neurons judge by appearances. You may know rationally that it isn't yours, but if the form is similar enough, your instincts accept it as functionally the same. Until-”

Suddenly, his fingers folded backwards. Hal let out an involuntary noise and jumped against the solid wall of Miller behind him. 

“-it does something unexpected.” 

Hal let his breath out. It took a second to realize the expected pain hadn't come. Miller let go and moved in front of him, wearing a smile like it was an old joke. Hal flexed his hand – the thinner, flesh-and-blood one – while he tried to get his balance back. It felt smaller and lighter without the Commander's resting on top. “Okay, _that_ felt weird. I didn't know it could do that.” 

“Good, that means the men are obeying orders not to spread any rumors. I like to keep it a surprise.” He rolled his sleeve down over the prosthetic and buttoned the cuff. “Getting slammed into the ground a few times will teach them not to make assumptions about what their opponent is capable of.” 

Hal winced in sympathy. A hit from that kind of hardware would be a lesson to remember, all right.

He put his tools away as Miller looked down at his hand, testing the movement, rotating it all the way around in a way that made something in Hal's wrist twinge. That one fact about him may have been kept quiet, but there were plenty of other stories that went around about the Hell Master. Once, he'd happened on a couple of usually friendly soldiers while they were talking about the Commander and comparing bruises in proud commiseration, and he'd gotten up the nerve to try to join in by asking how he'd lost the arm and leg. Shark had looked straight at him and said they were 'macheted off by bug-zombies.' That sort of thing was why Hal kept to himself. Just because he wasn't a soldier didn't mean they had to make fun of him. 

Miller, apparently satisfied, was pulling on his coat. Hal slid closed the drawer with his tools nestled on top of the layers of memos and old schemata, and looked up to see the Commander straightening his lapels. 

“Anyway,” Hal said, “if it starts acting up again, just let me know.” 

“I'll do that.” The Commander clapped him on the shoulder as he walked by. The metal hand had already cooled. “Thanks for the tune-up, Hal.” 

“Sure,” he said. “Any time.” 

The door swished shut behind him. 

Kind of strange to get called 'Hal' by him. He didn't like that name much, but it sounded better than the way Miller usually said 'Doctor Emmerich' in a voice like a heavy boot stepping on something small. 

Hal turned back to his monitor. This time of evening it was quiet and easy to think. He pulled up the diagram of Rex's ankle joints again to apply some ideas he had about flexibility.

* * *

The banks of black and white screens cast a glow that brightened and dimmed according to the figures that moved across them. In most the view was angled from above, panning back and forth. Security monitors were much more interesting than usual television. Instead of broad, obvious dialogue, you used gesture and motion to piece together the plot. An outdoor one showed a corner of a tarp over a crate had come loose and flapped in the wind. Another near the bottom showed ranks of empty desks and the back of someone leaning over a terminal. In one more, a man moved across a hall and off the stage. 

There was a beep from the door, followed by a click as the mechanism confirmed the keycard's clearance level and disengaged.

The stride was his calling card. A keen ear could pick up on the weight of every other step.

“Evening, Miller,” he said without turning. On one screen, a hallway was crossed by a sentry, consistent as a clock's second hand.

“Playing voyeur, Ocelot?”

Ocelot spread his hands. “Human drama. You don't get much of the genuine stuff in the movies these days.”

Miller took up a place behind him. A view of a stairwell caught three soldiers tramping down the spiral. “I found out what he was up to.” 

“Which is?” 

“Nothing.” There was bemusement in his voice.“It was purely mechanical curiosity. He didn't even try to plant a bug.”

The figure in the low monitor spread a diagram over a table, and leaned over it to mark notes. 

“So you started flirting,” said Ocelot. 

“Please,” Miller said dismissively. “When I flirt it's a lot more impressive than that.”

Ocelot ignored him. “Not your usual type, but I can see the appeal.” 

Miller's fingers drummed on the back of the chair. “You're reaching. I was interested in what he might be scheming, not in him.”

“Then you wouldn't mind if I did the same.” The screens rotated, some left and some right, an unsynchronized routine. Irony tinged his voice. “That is to say, investigated.” 

“Don't break him, Ocelot. We need him for Rex.” 

“Really, Miller, what kind of ridiculous monster do you think I am? We've worked together long enough that you should know I wouldn't squander an asset for no good reason.” He leaned back. A revolver spun lazily on his finger and reflected back the monitor's monochrome glow. “Besides, he might like me.” 

Miller let go and straightened up. “I'll believe it when I see it.” His footsteps were loud in the narrow room. They paused at the doorway. “Oh, and Ocelot?”

“Hm?” Onscreen, a soldier on patrol was fastening down the loose tarp. 

“Don't let the drama keep you too long. We have our appointment, remember.”

“Of course.” The gun stopped, then spun back the other way. ”I wouldn't want to break tradition.” 

Monitors hummed in the narrow room. Miller's shape crossed the field of the camera just outside the security post. His progress could be tracked along the bank of them as his familiar silhouette hopscotched from one monitor to another, moving up to down in one screen, background to foreground in another, a straightforward path glimpsed from varying angles until he strode off the left side of one monitor and didn't reappear. It wouldn't be right to have cameras outside the Commander's quarters. Ocelot didn't need them. He knew that doorway well enough.

The show was uneventful tonight. Before long, Ocelot holstered his gun and left the the bank casting its mute glow on the wall. The door closed on the empty room. No one watched his figure cross up to down, background to foreground, and to the left off the edge of the screen.


	2. [2] Revolver

Hal's back ached. He couldn't have said how long he'd been leaning at this angle in the forest of shadows and hanging wires. The light clipped to his shirt kept up a faithful blue glow. Here inside the radome it was easy to lose track of time. The front panel would be put on later, but for now it was almost a little cave. It was a bubble of peace that muted the noise of construction on the rest of Rex, turning them into a hum in the thick metal. A lot of people worked on Rex, but the radome was his baby. 

Sometimes he dreamed about being in Rex's pilot seat high above the world, with the whole immensity of metal wrapped around him, being the one whose guidance brought her alive. Of course, he knew he'd never get that chance. It was just wishful thinking and too much anime. 

He pushed himself in a little further so he could reach the very back, bringing half his body inside the thing and just his legs keeping balance on the scaffold outside. There was a lot to get done. You could tell the project was entering a crucial phase by how the Commander had come by earlier just to ask what he was working on. 

The scaffold trembled in the rhythm of footsteps approaching from behind him. He reached a hand backwards and called, “Pass me the three-eighths wrench, will you?”

“Here.” He felt the handle placed into his hand.

“Thanks.” He made a small _hah_ of satisfaction when the stubborn bolt came loose. A few minutes later, he backed out. It was like emerging from underwater into bright lights and noise. “Now, before we get the VR functions online-”

The tech he expected wasn't there. The only person nearby was Ocelot, standing by where the scaffold lead to the top of Rex. Hal swallowed his words. Too late. Ocelot had already noticed. He pulled his guns out and spun them in a flash too fast for better eyes than Hal's to follow. He tossed them in a high arc from hand to hand, then caught them behind his back. His expression was distant and unconcerned. He must have been bored. Hal went back to rummaging through his tools. If you couldn't get used to people having odd habits, you didn't last long at Shadow Moses. 

As he checked his schematics, he heard Ocelot make a _hmf_ sound. His steps had a jingle to them from the spurs, and made the scaffold tremble slightly. 

“What are you working on?”

Hal was happy to get an easy question. “Oh, this is part of the imaging system.” He patted the radome's shoulder. “Rex is basically impenetrable. The drawback is, with all that armor, there's no way for her pilot to see out. Bulletproof glass isn't exactly going to cut it. So this collects the visual data and feeds it to the pilot through VR.”

Ocelot gestured toward the radome. “Then this is the pilot's eyes.” 

Hal brightened. He never quite expected any of the soldiers to listen to this stuff. “Yeah, exactly.” 

The scaffold was narrow, so when Ocelot came to get a close look at the inside of the radome, he was close enough that Hal could smell leather and gunpowder. He traced the curve of the opening, where the shell was as thick as two of his fingers. 

“It's a beautiful creation,” he said, looking at it with appreciation as his glove burnished the metal. “The world's first invincible weapon.” 

“About that...” 

“Hmm?” Ocelot's hand paused.

The scaffold's waist-high railing was at Hal's back. “If the radome took enough damage, it would knock out the visual and the pilot would have to open the cockpit.”

“Ah.” Ocelot's fingers moved over the inner rim at the divot where the front plate would socket in. “So this is a vulnerability.” 

“It's more like a character flaw.” 

Ocelot straightened up and looked at him. Hal was ready with the argument about why the design had to be this way and why trying to change it here would mean throwing things off and having to compensate everywhere else and why the design was justified from a practical standpoint when Ocelot's left hand went to his holster and Hal was going to die without the chance to say a word.

The gun slid free with unhurried grace. It nestled in Ocelot's glove, with his finger resting outside the trigger guard.

“Do you know why I like these guns?” 

There were plenty of rumors about that. He liked playing Russian roulette with prisoners. They had a good weight for pistol-whipping. The bullets lodged and did more lasting damage.

“I thought it was the whole cowboy thing,” said Hal.

He made a sound that might have been amused. It was hard to tell with the mustache. “Partly that. Look.”

His thumb stroked along the length of the barrel, slow as rain running down a windowpane.

“This is the Single Action Army, the greatest handgun ever made. Be that as it may, it's not what we issue to the rank and file. Because...”

Quick as snapping his fingers, he popped the cylinder free. Each chamber was full.

Hal got it. “It's slow to reload.”

“Exactly. If these six aren't enough to kill anything that moves, every second until you're alive again could be your last. The only thing between you and death is a quick hand.” He snapped the cylinder into place, making the gun back into a seamless silver whole. “That's part of the charm.” 

Hal had never thought of immanent death as charming, but there was a warmth and fondness in Ocelot's voice that almost made it make sense. “It gives them personality.” 

“You understand.” He held the gun out. Hal thought he must be misinterpreting it until Ocelot gave a small prompting gesture and said, “Go on.” 

There was a steady stream of sounds of metal on metal and voices at work on the lower levels. Here up above, there was only the two of them.

The gun's shaft was cool and smooth as Hal ran his fingers toward the hilt. “It really is a masterpiece,” he said, half to himself. Beautifully maintained, too. You never thought of someone like Ocelot as a man who would repair something. Who would spend hours carefully oiling and polishing, and caring for the moving parts.

“Come to the range sometime and I'll show you what they can really do.” Ocelot's voice pulled him out of his trance. 

Hal moved his hand back. This wasn't for admiring. It was for killing people. 

“Right.” The silence hung for a moment. “I'd better get back to work.” 

Ocelot nodded. The revolver spun an arc that concluded in the holster. His eyes were already elsewhere. “I'll drop by to see how she's coming along. Until then, Doctor.”

Hal returned to the radome. The scaffold shifted as weight left it, and spurs clinked across Rex's back.

* * *

“He's showing off.” 

Though the guns were too small and quick to make out on the monochrome screen, Ocelot's stance and motion was unmistakable. 

“It's not working.” Kaz said. His chair creaked as Big Boss rested his arm on the back. “His audience isn't paying any attention.” 

“He won't give up that easily.” Big Boss pulled an apple from his coat's pocket and bit in.

“It wouldn't be interesting if he did.” The camera, set above the hangar, displayed a head of long, white hair angled in close conference with a smaller man.

Meditative crunching sounds came from behind him. “You sure either of you has a chance?”

Kaz's confident gesture silhouetted his artificial hand against the screen. “Have you ever taken a good look at his file? There's something interesting under things an enemy might use against him. 'Has a weakness for older men.'”

“Hmm.” The screen caught Big Boss's attention. “There he goes. 'The greatest-'”

“-handgun ever made,'” they said in unison.

“Oh,” Kaz said, leaning forward, “Look at that! He's touching the gun.”

“He's letting him touch the gun,” Big Boss echoed. 

“What is that for Ocelot, first base?”

Big Boss bit through the apple's core. “Think you can catch up?”

Kaz's lips curved. The gray light of the monitors flickered over the lenses of his sunglasses. “I'm still in the lead.”


	3. [3] Boss

The lab was peaceful this way, dark and quiet. Hal's desk lamp made a little island of glow that was enough to read his notes by. He turned from his computer screen now and then to flip through the diagrams and scrawl an adjustment. There was only the creak of his chair, the tap of his keys, and the scratch of his pencil as the program made its way from idea to execution. He lost track of time in absorption and solitude. 

A voice by his ear said, “Hey.” 

“H, holy-!” Every muscle Hal owned sprang in a different direction. His chair knocked back and was about to smack him into the ground when a hand caught it and returned it upright. Hal was left staring into the intruder's face and trying to get his heart back down into his torso.

“Snuck up on you, huh,” said Big Boss. 

All Hal could think was that the rumors about Ocelot and Commander Miller were nothing compared to the rumors about him. You heard them even if you didn't talk to people much. Big Boss was one thing they all had in common.

He was practically more legend than man. The stories ranged from the astonishing to the frankly silly. He had singlehandedly ended the Cold War, he could kill a man with a banana, he had once punched a bear unconscious and carried it home, he was fireproof, he had killed a ghost, he had once finished a mission before it technically began, he could talk to animals, he ate hornets by the handful, he could see through walls. Once it had been too much for Hal. He had thrown his hands up from his keyboard, spun his chair around, and demanded in exasperation, “How do you even kill a _ghost_?”

Kevin had intoned, “As hard as you can.”

Looking up into the gaze of one steady blue eye and one tailored black patch, Hal managed an intelligent, “Uh, yeah. I mean, yessir.” 

Big Boss's hands settled into the pockets of his long coat. Hal tried to straighten up some of the pens that had gone flying when he'd jumped out of his skin. 

“Relax,” Big Boss said. “I'm not here to give you trouble.” He sat on the edge of a desk. The hem of his long coat swayed above the floor. “You're not down at movie night.”

How did you talk to somebody people said could live for weeks without food or water?

( _”Photosynthesis.” “He does not have photosynthesis, Kevin!”_ )

(At least Courtney was on Hal's side there.)

(She'd still joined in with everybody on voting for the movie Kevin nominated, though.)

Hal shrugged and took the easy path of just answering the question. “I'm not really interested in Dracula.” 

Big Boss tilted his head and said thoughtfully, like he wasn't one of the most dangerous men in the world, “I liked the Kubrick trend better.”

“Me too.” The base had been having a phase for a while. They tended to go in cycles. Hal had gone down to some of those. “Though, it's funny. You wouldn't think any of those would be popular around here.”

“Hm?” 

Once the initial shock wore off, it wasn't surprising that Big Boss would show up here. He was well known for appearing all over the base at unexpected times and talking to just about anybody. Maybe he was keeping an eye on all the workings of the base, or maybe just because it was his home, too. Hal had spoken to him a few times before, but never casually or alone. 

“I mean, with everybody here living on top of a bunch of decommissioned weapons, you'd think Doctor Strangelove would be the last thing they'd want to see. But then, watching it, it was actually kind of comforting.” 

“Comforting?” It was inquisitive rather than mocking. The eyepatch strap furrowed his gray hair. 

Hal thought of bombs arcing across the globe, drawing a neon line over a map on an old-fashioned screen. “I mean, that's what we're protecting against, isn't it? All those senseless mistakes people make. Once Rex's missile defense system is complete, nothing like that will ever be able to happen.” 

Big Boss sat on the edge of a desk. “You think a machine can stop humans from killing each other?” 

“It can keep us from wiping ourselves off the planet, at least.” Hal smiled ruefully. “I know it's not a miracle. It's just a tool, so it all depends on who uses it. Anyway, it's better than 2001. Every time that's on, all I hear is 'open the pod bay doors' for days.”

“I've never seen that one.”

“You must be too busy for that kind of thing, running this whole place.” 

“I'm not the only one.” 

“Right, there's Ocelot and Commander Miller. They've been by to see Rex a lot lately.”

A slight smile showed on Big Boss's face. “Don't worry about them. They're competitive, and they always make things more complicated than they need to be.”

Apropos of nothing, Hal remembered he'd also heard that the Boss had stolen someone's heart. He wasn't certain it was a metaphor. 

Hal blinked at him. “Huh?”

With a soft shift of leather, Big Boss got up and came closer. His boots tapped on the tile. “Everyone has illusions they need. Theirs is that they hate each other.” 

They also said that, more than once, he'd saved the world. 

He leaned over Hal's station, good eye focused on the screen. “So, what are you working on?”

That was when Hal remembered exactly why he'd taken the chance to get this done while no one else was around. Color crept up his neck. “Oh, it's just something special for Rex.”

“Something special?” His hand rested on the desk as he bent close to see, though the figures on the screen wouldn't mean anything to someone who hadn't been arranging them for the past few hours. He smelled like leather and cigars. 

“Some of us were thinking about Rex's defenses.” He began hesitantly, but as he described the idea, the excitement of inspiration tinged his voice. “The missiles and machine guns, those are fine for a target at a distance, but they're not so effective against something nearby of a comparable size. So, why not make all that weight and armor into a weapon in itself?”

 _Because we have a deadline, Emmerich,_ according to Baker. 

“You mean,” Big Boss said slowly, “giving the robot its own kind of CQC.”

“Well, yeah. Basically.” Hal's nerves came back in force. Of all the people to find him out, it had to be the one they said could kill ten men in a room before the first noticed he was dead.

“That's...” Big Boss's eye sparked alive. “...brilliant!”

Hal blinked. The word rang, not quite parsable, like a tuning fork struck by his ear. His voice struck a hopeful lift. “You think so?”

“Absolutely. Why didn't I think of it before?” His gloved finger tapped on a sketch of Rex on Hal's desk. His voice had the kind of verve and enthusiasm some people got when talking about their favorite team. “Anything with legs can kick. The center of gravity is low so it'd be almost impossible to knock down, and with that kind of weight behind it, a hit at close range would be devastating.”

“That's exactly what I said!” Hal said. Then he dimmed slightly. “But it didn't even get to Commander Miller before getting vetoed. The verdict was it wasn't a good use of resources.” 

“Put it in.” Big Boss clapped him on the shoulder with a strength that nearly knocked him out of the chair. “On my authority.” 

“Really?” He'd given up on anything but a daydream of maybe slipping a few moves in when no one was looking, let alone getting approval from the man in charge. “Thank you, sir!”

Big Boss's eye was skimming over the diagrams that littered Hal's desk, where he'd taken apart Miller's arm the other day. “Now tell me. Do you think you can get this thing to headbutt?”

“Actually, that's something I was working on.” Hal tapped some keys and brought up the simulation onscreen. “See, like this.” 

A green wireframe model of Rex faced down a tank. With a few clicks that told it to execute the motions, Rex slammed itself forward into the opponent with a soundless impact that you couldn't help but feel as a _crunch_. 

“Hah! You're a genius!” Big Boss crowed. He slung his arm around Hal's neck and gave him a kiss.

* * *

_“Laugh all you like. I think he's fascinating.”_

The projector set up at the back of the hall was an old-fashioned type, at Ocelot's insistence. Mismatched folding chairs raided from storage were arranged in ranks in front of the screen and filled with the people who made their lives in the base. The monochrome light made them uniform. 

“Don't leave the window open, dumbass!” someone called.

It took some time to set up, especially given that someone was always messing with the projector when no one was looking, but it boosted morale, and at a facility in the middle of nowhere, there were few things as valuable as simple indulgences that staved off cabin fever. 

A cheer came up when the bat appeared.

The empty chair between Miller and Ocelot was a mutual understanding. Even when he wasn't coming, you saved the Boss a seat. Miller's arm was draped across the back.

The count loomed over Lucy's bed. Miller stole a handful of popcorn. Ocelot, never so crass as to talk during a movie, slapped his metal hand away in silence. The count leaned in.

The men whooped as the screen faded to black.

“Should've seen it coming,” Miller said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter brought to you by how super excited Big Boss gets about box tanks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKJekzRHiUU


	4. [4][SUBSISTENCE] Commander

The A string was too high. Kaz pluck it a few times and adjusted the key. His left hand felt the vibrations directly, his right at the distance of a tool. Strings to arm to him.

_The memories were in brief clips divided by the rage and betrayal surging in steady heartbeat pulses, like fragments of a damaged tape. Snake looking almost, ridiculously, hurt. ”Kaz, I had to.”_

_The ache of his gritted jaw. “You son of a bitch.”_

_“It wouldn't have worked any other way. I needed you here.”_

_A snarl flattening his lips. “That's no excuse.”_

_The maddening honesty in his eye. "I sent you my best man."_

His hat was set beside him. The breeze lifted his hair from his brow. There was bite in it, the proof that Alaskan winter didn't die easily, even while spring gained ground with every minute the days lengthened. If you looked from the helipad you could see green spreading out below, out beyond the concrete yards and walls with the curls of barbed wire topping them like foam on cappuccino. The sun was sinking toward the rim the ocean made. 

The strings pressed into his fingertips as he idled through a few chords. 

_His crutch struck the floor like a railroad spike. He stalked forward and hissed words through his teeth. “You used him. You used me. You betrayed everything we were working for.”_

_Snake set the large case he was carrying on the floor. “Kaz, hear me out-”_

_His crutch lashed out. The jolt up his arm was as bitter and keen a satisfaction as the surprise in Snake's eye._

The motion of strumming felt good, and his machinery was as responsive as you could ask for. A distant caw carried through the air, and the dark shape of a bird took flight from the wall at the approach of a passing patrol. He began to pick out the melody of a song that came to mind, one he hadn't heard in a long time.

_He panted against the floor. Snake's knee was heavy in the small of his back._

_“You remember why I didn't kill you that day, when we first met? It wasn't just that you had courage. It was that you'd pull out any dirty trick it took to win. You used every weapon you had left."_

_He always did make you listen._

Kaz was out of practice. The tune was soured with wrong notes. 

_"I brought something for you."_

_Kaz pushed himself up from the ground on his arm and forced it to hold through its trembling._

_“What's that?" Acid soaked his voice. "Something you think will make up for it?”_

_“No. Take them.”_

_His sunglasses were slipping down his nose. Harsh light that infiltrated over the rim and made his eyes water._

_"Go to hell. I don't need any of your jokes."_

_“I know you're not going to forgive me. That's your right. But take them, when you're ready to stop hurting more than you have to." His boot hissed on the floor as he turned. "Call it back pay."_

Soon his fingers remembered, and it began to ring true. It took concentration to mediate the prosthesis's brute strength. He'd picked up a guitar again years after he'd accepted that the old hobby was a part of his past he'd never get back. He'd held it for a while, like a relic from the old days, a memory preserved through catastrophe like ruins protected by ash and waiting to be rediscovered.

 _He dragged himself across the floor until his fingers closed around his crutch. The wall took his weight. By the time he struggled up, the footsteps were gone._

His first touch had snapped all the strings. 

_Two silver limbs nestled in recesses in the dark gray foam, like trophies cut from a man-shaped creature._

_The case was almost too heavy to lift one-handed._

As he learned, there was an art to modulating the pressure, whether plucking strings or taking someone's hand. His fingers struck an arpeggio, and he hummed under his breath. 

_They were works of staggering complexity and cutting-edge techniques that beggared anything he'd ever seen, pinnacles of technological accomplishment attached to his flesh._

_There was a cold exhilaration to how fast he could move. Barefoot, every other step clanged. It would be later that he'd notice they were customized to his balance, his grip, his stance, the way he grappled and the way he held a gun._

_Snake looked up when the door opened, his eye bright. "Good, you put them on."_

_Kaz punched him in the head._

Under the steady tune of the guitar, there was the creak of the door to the helipad opening and closing. A pause. A short sequence of footsteps. 

_The last shelf still attached creaked, then fell scattered reports on the floor. Every piece of furniture in the office was smashed. In the middle of the wreckage, they lay on their backs and panted. A fragment of chairleg dug into Kaz's side. The next day black and blue would mark every part of him that wasn't made of metal._

_Beside him, Snake looked up at the ceiling. The rapid movements of his chest fluttered his torn lapel. Into the silence, as he caught his breath, he said, "Those work pretty good."_

_It was a moment before they both started laughing, and a long, long time until they stopped._

Kaz looked out at the horizon as his hands kept up the meandered. "I take requests, if you speak up." 

"Oh. No, I..." The soft, startled voice didn't belong to a soldier. Kaz's hands stopped, and the music dropped away, leaving the rooftop in silence textured with the hum of the breeze and the cries of distant ravens. "I didn't mean to listen in. I just- I know that song." 

Kaz looked over his shoulder to see the young Doctor Emmerich standing a distance away with his hands tucked into the pockets of the jacket over his labcoat, looking like an intruder caught in the open. The breeze blew an eddy of dust that skidded haltingly across the white bar of the helipad's H and fetched up against his shoes. 

"Is that so?" Kaz slung his legs around to turn and face him. He let the instrument rest on his lap. "How is it you know a Japanese folk song from the seventies, Doctor?" 

Make that an intruder with a flashlight being shone in his eyes. Behind him, the black mark of a raven landed on the gray roof the stairwell shed and arranged its wings in a shrug. "No reason. I must've just heard it somewhere." 

In regarding his face, Kaz made an interesting discovery. "You're a terrible liar," he said, brows arching with pleasant surprise. 

"I guess so, huh," he said sheepishly. He made a move back toward the door. "Anyway, I didn't know there was anybody up here. Sorry." 

Not that easily. "Wait," Kaz said. Volume was only one part of command.

Emmerich was caught in midstep. "Yessir?"

"You really know it? _Kono oozora ni tsubasa o hiroge..._ " he sang.

The raven cawed and took flight. Hal waved his arms urgently in front of him. "Never mind. It must've been my imagination." 

Kaz set the guitar on the ground beside him with care and gestured _come-here_ in the upside-down way that never felt natural, even after all these years. Emmerich moved forward until his feet brushed the edges of long, lank shadow Kaz cast. 

"You're not down at dinner," Kaz observed. He turned back toward the view of the island and the setting sun."Sit."

He settled down onto the roof at Kaz's side. He looked younger than you would expect from the gray in his hair. At a distance, the eye, for lack of information, filled in the blanks with what it expected to see. There was always a surprise in looking closer and seeing each way that prediction was wrong. 

"Trying to fight through the line on curry night is taking your life in your hands." He gestured toward the instrument. "I didn't know you played guitar." 

"It's a good way to test precise movements." He lifted his hand and pushed his sleeve up to let the metal gleam gold-stained in the evening light. He curled the fingers down and back again, rapid and soundless. "It's been working perfectly. I should have put myself in your hands a long time ago." 

Easy, slow. Moving too fast would scare him off, and they had plenty of time, unless Hal developed a sudden affection for Ocelot, and that was as likely as developing a third eye. The old man had his appealing side but finding it took risk and effort, like getting the fruit from a saguaro. A man like this would be put off by the spines as nature intended. The fearsome reputation Ocelot was so proud of would only work against him here. 

Besides, anticipation was half the fun. 

"I'm glad it's holding up," Hal said, looking away across to the ocean. The color in his face might have been from the breeze. It always took Kaz by surprise whenever a chance to ingratiate himself was met with embarrassment instead. 

"What are you doing up here?" Kaz asked. 

"It's a good place to think." 

There was little telling what a man like this really thought about. He kept to himself. His communications off-base were more closely monitored than most. Or would be, if he ever made any. Odd sorts ended up out here, pulled into Snake's field. 

"Something on your mind?" 

The breeze drifted hair into his face. He pushed it away. "Just trying to figure the Boss out." 

The sound Kaz made was of deep fellow-feeling. "You're going to need all the time in the world for that." 

Hal glanced at him. "You've worked with him for years, haven't you?"

Kaz looked out at the distant gleam of the ocean. The scent of it was sharp and cold, here. Nothing like the heat that seeped into your skin and filled your lungs, at the center of another ocean. None of the iron smell and constant suspicion of rust eating the ground out from under your feet. "Decades." 

More or less.

"So you must known him pretty well." 

Through his glasses the sun was a dark orange coin. The breeze slipped beneath his collar."Have you ever heard the saying, 'Two people sleeping in the same bed can have different dreams?'"

"No," Hal said thoughtfully, "but I think I get it. It's like the one that goes, 'you made your bed, now lie in it,' right? So it means two people who do the same thing can get different consequences." 

Kaz had a feeling that something was rapidly escaping his grasp. "Not exactly-" 

"Or dreams as in hopes. Just because you're sleeping next to somebody, it doesn't mean you have the same aspirations."

"That's closer, but-" 

"Wait, I get it. It means if there's something like a gas leak, and one person breathes more of it than the other, they'll have weird dreams from oxygen deprivation." 

His face was nothing but earnest. 

"Never mind," said Kaz, who, when it came down to it, could recognize a losing battle. "What about your aspirations, Doctor? What brought you here?" 

He draped his lanky arms around his knees. "It's not a very good story."

"The true ones usually aren't." 

The sun struck his glasses and made them momentarily opaque. "Well. My grandfather worked on the Manhattan Project. Then, my father was born on August sixth, nineteen forty-five."

How appropriate. Kaz watched the flat disc of the sun, thinking of lights and hatred so bright they burned. "Was he."

"Yeah. I want to try to make up for it, somehow. I want to show that science can help people." He gestured toward the metal hand that rested on Kaz's knee, warmed by the late sun like it had been by Hal's grasp as he steadied it by the wrist and turned it to better let the light fall on the inside, his face transformed by concentration. "Like that." 

Kaz was used to the discomfort his missing limbs caused in people, with the exception of those who he'd known so long they might as well be attached themselves. He took pride in his refusal to be ashamed. He knew that now when he was called handsome - and it did happen, thank you - it came with an unspoken _despite_. Hal's immediate ease with them was unique. Likely his reaction to their touch would be, too. 

"That's either very noble or very naive."

"Probably a little of both," he admitted. "But if you can't trust a hero to use these things right, who can you? Not that I ever thought I'd end up anywhere near him."

"There aren't many of us who did."

Kaz's fingers tapped on the roof steadily in the shape of a chord progression. The sun had touched the horizon and now balanced there, staining the thin clouds. 

"Hey," Hal said. "What's he like, really?" 

Kaz leaned back on his left hand. The gravel was rough on his palm. "I've spent a long time trying to answer that." 

"What did you figure out?" The raven had returned, or sent one of its friends. It hopped along the edge of the rooftop past Hal. 

"The the right words don't exist for him." He tilted his head back. The chill in the air was growing stronger. "All you can say is everyone sees what they want to in him. The strange part is that none of them are wrong." 

"That...doesn't clear things up very much," Hal said. He was looking off into the distance, as though holding a puzzle in his head and trying to regard it from every angle. 

"Here's the kind of guy he is." Kaz felt a faint smile join the dying sunlight on his face. "If he sent someone to kill you, what you'd really be angry at him for is not doing it himself." 

Hal looked quietly troubled.

"What's gotten you so curious?" Kaz asked. 

"No reason. Just wondering." 

A slice of sun remained resting on the horizon as the floodlights came on below with a snap and a buzz. Kaz's smile deepened.

"You really are a terrible liar." He lifted his hand before Hal could protest. "It's all right. Keep your secrets." 

The base was a small world, and nothing could happen without him finding out sooner or later. Besides, it was an interesting change of pace to imagine someone being innocent. 

"It's nothing important, anyway," Hal said. "Just strange." 

The guard was changing. Doll-sized soldiers moved into position. One passed that narrow, shadowed gap between buildings without a glance. Kaz made a mental note to jump him from there later.

When he looked back to Hal's face, the troubled cast had deepened. He was tracing idle figures in the dust. The raven hopped nearer and cawed. 

"I can tell you one more thing about him," Kaz said suddenly.

Hal looked up. "Hm?" 

"You remember the old FOXHOUND logo?"

Hal tilted his head curiously. "The one with the cartoon fox with a gun?"

Kaz's nodded. "He designed it." 

Hal's laugh, bright with surprise, startled the raven into flight. "You're kidding." 

"Drew it on the back of a map during a meeting. Bullet with a face and everything." 

"Really?" 

Kaz nodded. "Really."

Hal gazed up into the early stars. "Huh. I guess you never know." 

Even as the light eased away, his features stayed distinct. Once you knew what to look for, he didn't look like him at all.

* * *

Another late night. Time had a way of getting away from Hal. His chair squeaked in the silent lab as he leaned back and cracked his neck. As he blinked the image of lists of numbers out of his eyes, he put a name to the strange thing that had pulled his attention away from Rex. Something smelled good. 

His eyes fell on the table behind him. There was nobody around. Just a plate of curry.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dramatic re-enactment of one moment here: https://youtu.be/IK2Gco_f2-I?t=11
> 
> The logo in question is this one: http://i.imgur.com/5WbAAPb.jpg  
> It is canon that this exists. 
> 
> Here, also, is a very nice guitar version of the song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhgLwBDx_PU


	5. [5.1] [EXTREME] Revolver

The gray dog's eyes were fixed straight ahead. His paws were splayed for secure purchase on the concrete, and his ears were down in suspicion.

"Hey fella," Emmerich said. 

He took a step forward. The dog's head lowered and a crest of darker fur rose on his back. 

His hand went into his pocket and came out holding something. He bent down and held it out at arm's length.

"You want some?" he said, in a coaxing lilt. "It's okay." 

Teeth made a ridge of white between the dog's lips, and a growl carried from low in his throat. 

Emmerich frowned at the warning. "Hey, c'mon-" 

The serrated sound of the snarling bark cut through the morning's silence and echoed between the walls. It was possible it carried all the way to the other end. On still nights if you stood outside the communications tower and looked out toward the kennel by the cave, you could hear them howl. 

"Angel Eyes." 

The dog fell silent and turned an attentive gaze toward where Ocelot emerged from the alcove. Emmerich jumped like he'd been caught red-handed. 

"I was, uh, just..." 

"Easy," Ocelot said to the dog, his body hiding the low hand motion that was the essence of the command. The impending attack melted out of the animal's stance, though his eyes stayed alert. "What's that you have there?" 

"Just some beef jerky," Emmerich said, lowering his hand.

"Not from the mess hall, then. Good. Miller would have you thrown into the ocean if he caught you giving anything from his kitchens to the dogs." He scratched the top of the dog's head, nearly level to his waist. Angel Eyes grunted in appreciation as his gloved hand ran over the ridge of his skull. "It wouldn't work no matter what you had. They're trained not to take food from strangers. Poison is the classic technique to keep guard dogs quiet." 

Emmerich's eyes widened as though that were surprising. "What kind of lowlife would poison a dog?" 

Ocelot looked steadily back at him. "The kind of lowlife who's trying to kill the rest of us."

"Yeah, but dogs... They're just animals. They can't protect themselves. At least somewhere along the line people knew what they were getting into." 

The dog's eyes followed the abortive, darting motion of his gesture.

Ocelot patted the dog's back. "Take it." 

He padded forward and sniffed at Emmerich's hand. When his teeth parted and plucked the jerky from his grasp, Emmerich revealed an unguarded smile.

Just as he thought. Miller's way in was his mechanical limbs. The dogs were Ocelot's. He felt the quiet professional pleasure of a piece of groundwork successfully laid.

"They're more wolf than dog,” he mentioned over the sound of the animal's working jaws.

"It doesn't really matter, does it?” Emmerich's other hand found its way to Angel Eyes' head and scratched between his ears. The animal's eyes lidded as he licked his palm clean. “They're loyal, and they do everything dogs do. Somebody must have spent a lot of time training them."

Ocelot spread his arms. “In the flesh.” 

A breeze slipped down between the walls and stirred Emmerich's hair. Young as he was, it was as gray as Ocelot's own. They couldn't all age in reverse like Miller. That man looked younger running at the head of a herd of recruits at sunrise today than he had thirty years ago, when they had first found each other as targets to absorb the pain of what they were missing.

“You did? Really?” 

“That's right. The litter of them had holed up here. Abandoned, or the mother was killed by a moose. It would have been a waste to shoot them. The boss saw potential and decided to put them to work. I had experience, so it fell to me.” 

“Oh,” Emmerich said. Ocelot folded his arms and waited. After a moment, Emmerich glanced up. “What? Is there something on my face?” 

“Ah, no,” Ocelot said, into the lack of a single word about cats. “You sound surprised.”

“I guess I just never figured you for an animal person.” His fingers dug into the animal's ruff, making Angel Eyes sigh and lean his weight against him. His hands were long and fine-boned. An artist's hands, put to the medium of weaponry. 

Above them, the sky was lightening. Clear today. The door to the communications tower was in need of repainting. He'd assign someone to take care of it. It was important to maintain the look of normalcy in these days, as though the status quo would carry on indefinitely.

“You've heard the rumors calling me a monster.” 

Ocelot didn't see any reason to be delicate. It had to be dealt with if he was going to get anywhere, and as little as Emmerich's opinion of him mattered beyond the scope of this game, it would be irritating to leave the wrong idea lodged in his mind unchallenged. Call it aesthetics. 

“They don't call you that,” he said. The heel of his sneaker twisted a slow quarter-circle back and forth on the concrete.

Ocelot unfolded one hand toward him. “That's what the majority mean when they say 'torturer.'” 

“Well, it's true that that's your job, isn't it?” 

“Part of it. Information can save lives or take them as well as this.” He patted the gun in his right holster. “We're all killers here. My skills are nothing more than another tool. Ironic, isn't it? Kill a dozen men and you're a hero. Use pain and fear to prevent the necessity and you're the villain.”

Ocelot was used to the cold judgment he received from men who assumed him to be the same breed of crude, ridiculous creature as the late Colonel Volgin. It took a rare man to understand. Oddly enough, they tended to be ones who had experience with the receiving end. 

“I don't know anything about any of that.” Emmerich was watching the dog lick his palm. “I can't agree with torturing people. But I don't think you're as cruel as they say.” 

Ocelot's brows rose. Irony laced his voice. “What's your evidence?”

“Nobody who likes dogs could be a completely bad person.” A frown of confusion tugged the corner of Emmerich's lips. “What's so funny?”

“You're unique, Doctor. By that measure, you're a good man.” 

“Thanks?” 

“It's not a compliment. Good men don't survive in this business.” 

“I know it's dangerous. But I think it's worth it, being here and doing this. REX could change the world.”

At that moment, Ocelot was struck by the absurd possibility that Emmerich was an honest man, as useless and decorative as a coral paperweight. Well, he could hardly say he had anything against anachronisms. 

“She will,” Ocelot said. The breeze toyed with the ends of Emmerich's hair caught beneath the arms of his glasses, and in the morning quiet and the sharp sunlight that silvered the glass, he looked as though he had found something in Ocelot's face that surprised him and was searching for its name. 

In the photograph the woman had been slim and severe, with an androgynous beauty the dark glasses over her eyes accentuated by concealing. She had stood straight-spined in the background next to the fingers he held it between, its back tacky with residue from the curl of tape that had held it to the cylinder that spoke and flashed a red light in the black metal like an aircraft in the night sky. ( _”You can't use magnets, it could scramble the storage,”_ he had babbled. There were the ones who resisted with silence and the ones who never stopped talking, throwing out flares of useless information and obvious lies to lead you into wasting time in asking how a weak magnet could destroy what thousands of tons of water couldn't, or in pointing out that it was childishly obvious that if he had been able he would have already destroyed the information sepulchred inside.) Photographs had felt crucial in those days, as much to him as to the man who papered the aerial command center with evidence of the people who needed him.

Ocelot gestured downward. “Look out. You have a thief on your hands.” 

“Huh- hey!” Angel Eyes had worked his muzzle into the pocket of his coat. When he was caught, his head pulled back and the bag of jerky fell to the ground. The dog looked to it and up in bland innocence. 

“You can't take your eyes off him,” Ocelot said. “He's an opportunist.” 

“I guess so.” Emmerich knelt down to pick it up. He opened the top and held it toward Angel Eyes, whose ears pricked up in interest. “Here, you can have the rest. Hey, don't eat the bag!” 

The bag crinkled as the dog's head dove inside. His tail swayed its fine fringe of fur behind him. Emmerich's long fingers delved into the thick ruff of his neck, and he smiled. 

Ocelot said, “Come with me.” 

“Huh?” His attention was pulled away from the dog. “Where?” 

Ocelot turned, his coat sweeping behind him. The jangle of his spurs counted his steps. 

“There's something you should know how to do.” 

**SAVING...**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It may sound silly, but moose really do kill dogs. It comes up in the book Winterdance by Gary Paulsen, which I absolutely recommend if you'd like to hear about what a crazy ordeal the Iditarod is and possibly, like me, think about Solid Snake the whole time. It also contains the advice, "Do not kick a skunk." 
> 
> If you'd like to talk about fic or MGS or dogs or whatever, come chat with me at [higharollakockamamie.tumblr.com](https://higharollakockamamie.tumblr.com/).


	6. [SIDE OPS] Dogs of War

It only happened once. 

The chair in Miller's office creaked with every movement thanks to the sea air that planted rust anywhere it could reach. Ocelot sat, one leg crossed, his spur ringing softly with his boot's idle motion, saying something rote and bland that rolled easily off his tongue about readying a crate of tranq ammo for when the boss called for resupply. Miller's hand, grasped tight enough around a pen to whiten the knuckles, made a quick cutting motion. 

“There's no one listening,” he said. “You can quit playing that game.” 

Ocelot, his arm draped over the back of the chair, said, “I'm not playing anything. We have work to do for the boss.” 

Miller's teeth were gritted. “He isn't here.” 

“Mm.” Ocelot gave an absent nod. “He's halfway to Kandahar by now.”

Miller's temper snapped like a masthead. 

There was a ringing in Ocelot's ears. He found himself interested in the way Miller's sunglasses slipped down the bridge of his nose in increments. The force of his voice was visible in the tendons and the working adam's apple of his unshaven throat. 

“Ice is heavier than water,” Ocelot spoke to the light fixture on the bare wall, under the current of Miller shouting things he was far too stupid to understand. 

He burned himself out, eventually. Silence rose back into existence. The sunglasses didn't cover the lines around his eyes. 

“The supply team will have everything ready,” said Ocelot, and the sides of the conversation stitched together over the blank piece of time.

Miller exhaled and rubbed his head with the edge of his hand. He said, “Fine.” 

Ocelot levered himself up. The tapping of his boots had brought him to the door when Miller said, “Ocelot.” 

“Hm?” He turned, his hand falling from the panel that would slide it open.

Miller was leaned back in his chair, motionless behind the paper-strewn desk. Maps, reports, boxes of files. The only thing he brought here was his work. There was no telling where he was looking from behind those sunglasses unless you were close. 

“Don't do that,” he said. 

Ocelot turned and spread his empty hands. “You're going to have to narrow that down.” 

Miller's hat shadowed his face. There was little visible but his thinned lips and the color left in his skin from his tirade. “Don't go blank like that. You were staring up at nothing like a corpse at the bottom of a river.” 

There was a soft sound of leather as Ocelot straightened his sleeve. “I'm afraid I have no idea what you mean.” 

“No,” Miller said, resignation heavy in his voice. He had never sounded more like an old man. “Of course you don't.” 

There was work to do. The base had to be run and the boss was under their protection. Ocelot paused. Something important was nagging at the back of his mind. The only thing more important was to ignore it. 

He didn't face him entirely. He left the door locked, and looked over his shoulder. 

“He never left,” Ocelot said, with more significance than the words called for. He wondered why and stopped himself from wondering. With a careful, measured deafness, he permitted his larynx to work on its own. “That's why we have to be here when he comes back.”

By the time he walked out the door he had forgotten it.

* * *

Taking their loneliness out on one another wasn't so different from comradeship. 

“He didn't say a word about you.” Miller's crutch tapped the concrete. 

Miller never spoke until he had his breath back from hauling himself up the stairs. Too bad it didn't last longer. The sunset over the water was picturesque in silence. 

“Is it supposed to be an insult to me that I wasn't worth bringing up?” Ocelot's hands were clasped behind his back as he looked out over the base. The reflection of the sunlight off the sea gave the distant strut and men on patrol a two-dimensional quality like plywood set dressing. “Or to you, that he didn't tell you about his old partner?” 

He didn't need to see Miller to know when his teeth were clenched. It was most of the time, anyway. “He abandoned you.” 

“He's a free man.” Snake was on the other side of those waters. They never talked about questions of the old days. He wouldn't be able to tell Ocelot anything he didn't already know. 

“He threw away everything you were working for, and still you follow him and do whatever he says. No wonder you and the dog get along.” 

Ocelot turned. Miller was watching him from the lawn chair with his hand gripped around the arm. The breeze that lifted Ocelot's hair tugged at his empty sleeve. “What do you want me to say, Miller? If it's a fight you're after, one of the recruits would indulge you.”

“Be angry!” His cane rapped against the leg of the chair. The metallic ring lingered. “For one minute of your life, resent him like a sane man.” 

“I can't do that for you. Love your pain all you like, but you're going to have to do it alone.” 

John's grip on his heart was airtight. He could go on for as long as he needed, needing nothing in return. Miller was as aware of that as Ocelot was of his jealousy. 

“Don't you dare look down on me,” Miller snarled. His gloved hand was clutched around his cane, and he was struggling halfway through the process of rising. “If it had been _you_ who got hacked into pieces—” 

The waves meandered beneath the strut. Seagulls cried. 

Ocelot had been wondering when he would come out and say it. 

The chair creaked under Miller's weight falling back.

“You wouldn't care, would you,” he said, with a soft, razor-edged thoughtfulness. “If someone cut off your right arm for him, you would tie a bandage around it and carry your gun in your left.” 

Ocelot met the eyes of his reflection in Miller's glasses. His flesh was a tool like any other, and what happened to it wasn't of any especial concern. The substance that animated Ocelot and made him himself was located outside of his body.

“It wouldn't change the mission.”

Miller's lips pulled back from his teeth. “That's disgusting.” 

There wasn't any answering anger on Ocelot's face. Caring about John too much could never register as an insult. 

He said, “There are worse things to live for.” 

The energy of anger went out of Miller's posture. His head fell back onto the chair's plastic slats, and the habitual lines of exhaustion took their place at the corners of his lips. “You're crazy, you know,” he said conversationally. 

“If I am, so are you.” 

“For the same reason.” The edge was gone from his voice. He'd spat out all his poison for now, and Ocelot had too high a tolerance to take it personally. Rising to the bait would only indulge him, and after all, when it came down to it, he wasn't wrong. 

“Both with the luck to end up on the other side of a battlefield from him. I heard about how you tried to fight. You were resourceful.” 

Miller grunted. “For all the good it did.” 

Ocelot leaned against the railing and looked past Miller to the silhouettes of the gulls against the sun. It sank fast, here over the water. You could see the ocean swallow it inch by inch.

“He smashed me into the ground the first time we met.” Every time they fought, they found another thing they had in common. “I hope you weren't stupid enough to challenge him to a wrestling match.” 

Miller grunted, with a twist from the corner of his lip. “A few other things. An eating contest.” 

A sound of amusement came from Ocelot's throat. 

“I'd never seen him eat,” Miller said in his defense.

“Once you do you never forget.” Watching John eat was an experience. The toe of Ocelot's boot tapped on the platform with a muted sound. “The rumor was he could skeletize a cow in fifteen minutes. I'd put it closer to twelve.” 

Lately Snake ate as methodically as he cleaned his guns, and brought home livestock without asking how they might taste. It was something else the coma had taken from him. 

“I tried every dirty trick I knew. He always knew more and dirtier.” Miller's sleeve flapped against the chair's frame. “I never knew he had anyone he'd left behind. All the time I was fighting to get away from his side, you...” 

Ocelot opened his hands. “Would have given a limb to be there.” 

Miller's shadow was long and sharp-edged on the deck. The glasses couldn't hide the intent way he was looking at him. 

He was never sure who started laughing first.

* * *

That was how some fights ended.

Other changed when Miller grabbed Ocelot by the lapel, and the bang of his crutch on the floor met and married the violence of the jerk of Ocelot's head that brought his lips over his in what could have been accident, the way a fight with an opponent you've half-learned makes for moments when you misjudge and counter a move that wasn't made. He tasted like the half of the coffee that wasn't still left in the mug on his desk, one of the logo-marked ones that had been manufactured out of thin air. In the gap beside his sunglasses he could see his pale eyes.

The first few times he stayed hidden in his clothes, as though his secrets couldn't be guessed and as though Ocelot hadn't seen worse. While he was using his mouth to pull Ocelot's scarf loose, all he opened was his belt and fly. He had become adept with one hand and very good with his teeth. Ocelot didn't need words to know that Miller considered every noise he could draw from him a victory. 

Afterwards Ocelot left without wasting the effort of picking up his crutch, knowing that Snake was the only man he accepted help from. 

For the rest of the day he wore his scarf wound tight. Every time he turned his head it twinged the bites and made them throb like the buzz of the platform beneath his boots when someone was playing music, and he thought again of Miller's stubble scraping the fresh sting, the wet heat of his breath on his skin, and how a sense of touch muffled by a glove didn't register the texture of his hair so much as the shape of his skull. 

The helicopter drew down onto the landing platform and Snake pushed himself out, wearing sand on his pant legs and spots of blood along his arm. His eye lingered on Ocelot's throat the way his hands often lingered on Miller's side. 

Ocelot said, “Welcome home, Boss.” 

Man or dog, new recruit or old comrade, they all got lonely when the boss went away.

* * *

Miller was an interesting man, cracked deeply enough that a weaker material would have broken. He kept himself together out of sheer refusal to give his enemy the satisfaction, like the rare man who spat in his interrogator's face even after the contest was decided. 

Their devotion to a man had cost them something and would cost them more. They would get nothing in return but the furthering of John's goals. The difference was that to Miller it wasn't enough.

* * *

On a night when the heat was as thick as swampwater, Miller fell back onto the narrow bed in his quarters hard enough to clang it against the wall.

“If you keep all that on,” Ocelot said as he knelt naked between his legs, the floor cool on his knees, “you're going to sweat to death before we're through.” 

Ocelot expected him to argue, and suspected it was just to spite him that Miller didn't. He allowed Ocelot to pull his red tie loose and repay him his favorite trick of biting his neck. Miller's hand undid the row of buttons down the front of his shirt, a single quick gesture for each. Ocelot could feel him controlling his breath as he worked and nipped his skin between his teeth, and was gratified that the last button took two tries. 

Belt, coat, shirt, and vest laid open, his chest and stomach made a valley between the layers of cloth. He had a variety of scars. So did Ocelot, though his were more discreet. Both of them were blank canvases next to Snake. Ocelot didn't examine them or trace them with his fingers to commit them to memory. That would smell too much like sympathy for Miller to forgive. He held to his patience, and it was a stalled second before Miller's lip twisted defiance and he clawed all of it off to show, for the first time, where his other arm ended. His chest rose and fell quickly, and his glare through the grey-cloud lenses was a challenge to Ocelot to say a word.

He pushed Miller's pants down to mid-thigh, exposing him without trespassing on the no-man's-land of his lower left leg. He set his hands on his thighs and took Miller's cock in his mouth, and Miller fell back onto the mattress with a groan and a weight that made the bedstead shudder. It interested Ocelot to see how he fought off pleasure, and how with effort and concentration, the stubborn pain clinging to him gradually lost ground.

He knew Ocelot was safe, because he was the one man who could be trusted to never do him the insult of being kind. 

Adam sat on the edge of the bed with the sweat on his body slowly drying in damp air, the floor pressing against the soles of his feet. Soon he would gather up his clothes and go. Absently, his finger traced over the spines of the few volumes on the shelf by the bed. 

“Looking for something?” Kaz was on his back with his forearm over his eyes. 

“Anything but neurology. It's useful to know, but there's only so many case studies a man can take. Aphasia, Phineas Gage, the Capgras Delusion. They all blur together. ” His finger tapped on the top of a broad volume. “What about this?” 

“It loses something in translation,” he said drowsily, without looking. “But it gets the idea across.”

* * *

Having to kill a man or be killed by him one day was no reason to scorn his company. The future was a long road.

* * *

The survival trainer didn't break off humming to himself as Ocelot walked into his office, or look up from the schedules he was filling out with a pencil pincered delicately between his metal fingers. His sleeveless shirt showed muscle on one side and the place where the prosthetic melded with his body on the other. Adam had always found asymmetry appealing.

“Evening, Adam,” he said. 

“Evening.” The walls were covered in photos of Miller's graduating classes, a guide to identifying local poisonous and edible mushrooms, a picture of John eating one that Ocelot wouldn't guarantee was on the right side of that chart. It must have been taken that time he and Kaz had vanished into the woods for three days, right after he'd gotten his new limbs. “The reports came in.” 

The pen scratched onwards. “There'd better be something worthwhile from B Group. They've been in the field long enough to-- what are you doing?” 

Beside a hand-drawn poster of birds surrounded by descriptions written in intricate French cursive, there was a packed bookcase. Ocelot reached up, lifted the potted wormwood plant on top of it, and picked up the small key in the saucer. 

“I have news that's going to make you a happy man,” Ocelot said. He crossed the room to the file cabinet, where he unlocked the bottom drawer.

“Get out of there,” Miller said sharply, with a rap of his hand on the desk.

Ocelot drew out a pair of glasses and a bottle of twenty-one-year-old whiskey from the cabinet and nudged it shut with his heel. 

“I'm saving that!” 

“There'll never be a better occasion.” Ocelot set the glasses on the desk with a pair of demure clinks. He tilted the bottle toward Miller, meeting his eyes to be sure he would appreciate the moment with his full attention. “Huey Emmerich is dead.” 

Kaz's pen clicked down. His pale gold eyebrows rose above the field his glasses hid, and incredulous hope tugged the corner of his mouth. “Don't tease me about that, Adam. You can't be that cruel.” 

“His body was found in his own swimming pool. Suicide, they say.” 

Papers whispered as he pushed them out of the way. It was a full, broad smile now. “Do you believe it?” 

“I do.” The liquid splashed a generous measure into one glass and filled the air with orange and oak. On second thought, the lip of the bottle passed over the second and poured straight into Miller's FOXHOUND-logoed mug. A fox with a gun, really, John. “Reliable sources say there weren't signs of anyone giving him a helping hand off the mortal coil. Just a man whose sins finally caught up to him.”

“That's why you agreed with letting him go, isn't it? You knew it was only delaying the inevitable.”

Adam inclined his head, his ponytail brushing his shoulder. “You weren't wrong, back then. Only impatient.” He set the bottle down and wrapped his hand around the glass. The edges of its cut pressed lines through his glove. “They say he nearly took his daughter with him.” 

“Typical. He couldn't even die decently. You have eyes on the family?”

“Naturally. The boss put out orders to stay hands off, but keep anyone else from getting any ideas.”

Kaz's hand make a flicking gesture. “They're better off without him.” 

The corner of Ocelot's mustache twitched. He knew where he was going, and lifted his glass to meet him. “Like the world?” 

“Like the world,” Kaz confirmed. His metal fingers maneuvered around the mug's handle, and guided it to a delicate clink.

His voice was rich with satisfaction when he said, “It couldn't have happened to a better man.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! We'll be headed back to Shadow Moses in the next bit. I'm always working on polishing my stuff, so concrit is welcome.


	7. [5.2][EXTREME] Revolver

**LOADING...**

The thick walls made the firing range chill as a cave. The lights flickered once as always before buzzing to life with the thin noise of an insect swatted away from its resting place. 

“Have you been in here before?” Ocelot said as he went to the shelves in the corner. He hung a pair of earmuffs around his neck and put on the clear glasses. If he lost an eye to a rookie's flying casing, he would match John for just as long as it took the other man to laugh himself to death.

“No,” Emmerich said, “but I've seen the targets in the R&D Department. They pop up when they're doing special training. Once somebody nearly tranqed me when I was going to get post-it notes.” The point between his eyebrows creased. “Why is there one in the supply closet?” 

“Ask the Boss,” Ocelot said, the local dialect's version of _God only knows._ He handed the equipment to Emmerich. “Put these on. Yes, over your glasses.” 

The electronic lock on the rack of Mark 23s beeped to the signature of the security card in Ocelot's pocket and snapped open. You couldn't just leave them around where anyone could pick one up. He selected a weapon and offered the hilt. “Here. Take this.” 

Emmerich's eyes were unsure. He had no idea, yet, that there was nothing to be afraid of and much more to anticipate. Ocelot would be the first to show him the joy of that power. “I don't know anything about using a gun.”

Ocelot gestured again, more emphatically. “That's why I'm going to teach you. You know how they work, don't you?”

“I could tell you all about the chemicals in the primer, but I've never actually shot one myself.” 

“You've never been curious?” It was easy to forget there were people who hadn't learned to hold a gun before they learned to drive. In the case of one of the finest weapons designers in the world it was an absurd tragedy, like a chef who lived on canned soup.

“Well, a little bit.” He took the gun gingerly, like venturing a handshake with a rough-looking stranger. His index finger, Ocelot noted, stayed away from the trigger. That was one less bad habit to break him of. “But there was never really the chance to try it out. I didn't want anybody to laugh at me.” 

“We have the place to ourselves,” said Ocelot. “Miller has the men at his obstacle course, and he's put in a few new tricks since the ground thawed out.”

He had stood beaming and sweaty on the hill overlooking it with Ocelot and John, hand on his hip over his muddy overalls, and declared _I dug the tiger pits myself._

“They'll be busy for a while,” Ocelot said. “As for me, I've been doing this for decades. Whatever you can do, I've seen worse.” 

The lane he liked was near the far end. The tap of Emmerich's steps and the jingle of his spurs reflected off the cinderblocks as they passed the signs taped to the wall. Dented tin ones stating the range rules, the note anyone caught playing hide and seek there would be shot, those cartoons of the girl that there was no point in trying to get rid of, the safety poster that someone had drawn the inevitable eyepatch on. 

He watched Emmerich test the weight of the pistol as he stepped between the plexiglass walls. They looked flimsy from the outside, but in practice they cut out a block of the world where there was nothing but you, your weapon, and your skill. 

Ocelot shrugged off his duster and draped it over the bench by the wall, a battered metal thing where his sweat had fallen more than once on the late nights when he and John had challenged one another, John on the other side of the clear divider throwing him that smirk of his after every bullseye, until the real challenge became keeping his hands off of him until the round was over. The bench was narrow for the purpose, but they were resourceful men. There were few areas in the base that weren't imbued with fond memories. The place had John's presence mixed into the material, a substance strong enough to uphold a nation.

Emmerich's face was earnest and attentive while Ocelot ran him through the preliminaries. It was clear he understood the mechanism, despite never having put it into practice. The earmuffs were the electronic kind that blocked out gunshots but allowed conversations. The base was well equipped. The movements of Emmerich's fingers as he loaded the clip were quick and focused as if to prove he was putting in his best effort, confirming Ocelot's suspicion that individual attention wasn't something he often got. 

If you needed information from a man like this, the quickest and cleanest method was to never let him know he had anything to hide. The secret of Ocelot's trade wasn't only in overcoming resistance but in preventing it. As long as they believed you were on the same side, all you had to do was ask. 

The clip snapped home. Ocelot stood slightly behind him and watched the line of his back. “Stand straight. Feet shoulder width apart. Raise the weapon in front of you and lock your wrists.” 

Emmerich did as he said, his movements scrupulous rather than confident. That was fine. Smoothing over timidity only took practice. Arrogance and carelessness, now, correcting that took being slammed into the ground a few times. 

Everyone had their own grip, as distinctive as handwriting. Some recruits held a weapon like a friend, others like a toy, others like a live scorpion. Miller grasped it like his pride, just like he had ever since the days when he would clack and sway over to the isolated cluster of targets on the R&D strut in the thin light of dawn when no one was looking. John didn't so much hold one as reattach a part of himself. Emmerich held it like an alien creature on its way to a jar for study. 

“Line up the sights over the target. Hold it as still as you can.” 

Emmerich shook his head without averting his eyes from the target. “I can't stop it drifting around.” 

“In a figure eight?” A nod. “That's normal. What it's showing you is your own heartbeat. There will always be a slight movement, unless you don't have to breathe.”

Another method, Ocelot thought, spinning the notion idly like a gun on his finger, would be to threaten someone he cared about. It was foolish to underestimate noncombatants. They could be surprisingly difficult, thanks to having something to prove. The technique was hamfisted and inelegant, but the effectiveness lay in giving them a way out. Submit to save yourself pain and you were a coward. Submit to save someone else and you kept your dignity. There was an invaluable usefulness to merciful lies. 

It was all academic, really, he thought as he watched Emmerich's shoulders rise and fall with his breath. Every angle of examination had borne out the result that the man was loyal.

“Get your finger on the trigger and time it for the bottom of the motion. Squeeze, don't pull, and be warned, it's going to be louder than you expect. When you're ready, fire.” The litany of instructions would be too many to remember at once the first time. Naturally it would take repetition, but it was a place to start. Ocelot had given the speech so many times it rolled off is tongue like a magician's patter. 

Emmerich fired. 

He jumped, of course. The report battered itself against the plastic shell of the ear protection, and the recoil sent the barrel jerking upwards.

“Woah,” he breathed. Color had stolen into his face, and his eyes were wide and astonished at feeling the kick in his hands for the first time. Beneath his mustache, Ocelot's lip curved. It was always something to see power's first kiss. 

His hand lifted from his hip to gesture him on. “Again.”

He learned quickly. The notch of concentration between his eyebrows aligned with the sights. The understanding and comfort with what he held in his hands sank into his posture, smoothing the tightness in his shoulders and straightening his spine. By the time the clip clicked empty, he was absorbing the sound of the shot easily, and his hands lowered the weapon with the beginnings of grace. 

“Not so bad, is it?” Ocelot said. 

“Yeah,” said Emmerich, with a note of surprise. “I think I'm getting the hang of it.” 

Calling the target up made it sway along its tracks. One mark along the white of the background, and a half-moon that had managed to catch the very edge of the paper. The silhouette was untouched. 

“Oh.” Emmerich slumped. “I guess not.” 

Ocelot's statement held true. He'd seen worse; just not many. “Accuracy isn't the point, the first time. It's about learning not to fear the weapon. That's enough for now.” 

His hand had closed around the lapel of his coat when Emmerich said, “Wait. Let me try again.” 

Ocelot set it down.

The target swayed back into the distance. The heel of Emmerich's hand pushed the fresh clip home. 

“Okay,” Emmerich said under his breath, raising the pistol. “Feet shoulder width apart. Wrists locked. Squeeze, don't pull. Fire at the bottom of the figure eight.”

The shots came in a steady rhythm, cracking out the scent of cordite and strengthening his stance with each repetition. Looking closely enough, Ocelot could see the precise moment when he forgot about the man and the world behind him and lived alone with the weapon and the target. 

No, Ocelot realized as he watched Emmerich's hands learn how to treat the gun, an echo of the warmth and care in the way he touched the Metal Gear. It was simple. To get anything you needed from him, all you would have to do was threaten Rex. He would face down hell before letting any harm come to his creation.

This time the silhouette was pockmarked with black holes. There was a pattern emerging from the chaos.

“Better,” Ocelot said, and the single word startled a smile from Emmerich.

“Really?” 

Ocelot pushed off the earphones, and the texture of the silence in the room sharpened to normal. After a moment, Emmerich did the same. His ears were reddened from the pressure. 

“You're no natural, but you're not hopeless.” As always at first, his voice sounded clear and strange in the open. “With some work, you'll be fully capable of protecting yourself.”

Emmerich looked down at the gun like he'd forgotten what it was for. He pulled the slide back, as he'd been told, and let it rest on the counter with the empty chamber open.

“I don't know,” he said. He stepped out of the shooting stance and the confidence that came with it ebbed away. “There's not exactly anybody coming after me.” 

“On the contrary. You're a prime target, Doctor.” Ocelot, for example, would head straight for him. “It's not only your value as a hostage. You see, REX has two weak points.” He touched his right shoulder, at the equivalent of the place where the capsule of sensory equipment rested on the machine's skeleton. “The radome-” -he tapped his temple - “ - and you.”

“Me?” By his face, it had never occurred to him. That marked him either as a fool or something much worse: honest. 

“If an enemy gets hold of REX's lead designer, they have access to every plan and piece of data in the system, every vulnerability, and all of her secrets. Having a weapon on hand protects both of you.” 

Emmerich's eyes lingered on the gun. He resettled the combination of his usual glasses and the eye protection, and brushed away a piece of hair that had been caught between the layers. “You mean carrying around one of those?” 

“Not that model. Something custom, for you.” Years of accommodating John's good eye and Miller's good arm had given Ocelot a habit of approaching from the left. Emmerich, already acting less like a prey animal, didn't flinch as he lifted his hand and considered the form of it. Long-fingered, pale and precise. Ocelot rifled through the catalogue in his mind as his fingers threaded between his, and the cold of his skin leached through his glove. The thought of a compact weapon nestled in a holster at the engineer's shoulder and revealed when he reached up into Rex's frame brought warmth into Ocelot's voice. “Something small caliber, but with stopping power. Finesse over brute force. Adjust it to your grip, extend the thumb safety to make it easier on the finger...”

“No! No thanks.” Emmerich pulled his hand away and stepped back until his shoulder struck the booth's plexiglass divider with a dull shudder that shook the hazy hint of his reflection. “I...It'd just be kidding myself. Targets are one thing, but I couldn't really shoot a person.”

It was a common line. Some people even believed it, right until the moment of truth. “Not even if you they were a threat to you?” 

Emmerich shook his head. “I'd have to try to find some other way out.” 

Curiosity stirred and stretched in Ocelot's mind. He lifted his hand and gestured toward him. “Say you had an enemy. Someone who'd wronged you and used you. Who considered you a worthless weakling.”

His boot tapped on the floor and brought him one step closer. 

“Say you had him dying on the ground at your mercy, and you had a shotgun and the chance to prove him wrong. Wouldn't you?” 

His denial wasn't immediate. He took a moment to think it through, gray eyes sliding sidelong and upwards to where an insect was pinging off the fluorescent light. 

“I couldn't,” he admitted. “Besides, what's even the point, if he's already dying?” 

Hm. 

Ocelot slid the revolver from his right holster. A snap of his wrist set it spinning, and made the steady pressure of motion ring his finger. “You're a strange man, Doctor.” 

His narrow shoulders stiffened. “You don't have to insult me.” 

“I wasn't. The revolver flashed from hand to hand. “A better word for it is 'interesting.'” 

“Oh.” He looked to find that more palatable. He gazed off through the neat holes the bullets had punched through the target, entry and exit wounds equally bloodless. Ocelot's hypothetical lingered in the fine lines by his eyes, evidence that he didn't take the idea of the gun's use any more lightly than he took the weapon itself. 

“Squeamishness will hamstring you. There's a science to pulling the trigger. Tricks that soldiers are taught. It may sound heartless, but it's as much a part of survival as Miller's lessons about starting a fire with a battery and steel wool. Learn that, and they would think twice about calling you a coward.” 

“People can call me what they want.” His fine fingers picked up the gun to clean it. “But this much is good to know how to do. Thanks, Ocelot.” 

Ocelot walked up behind him, spinning the gun in lazy revolutions in time with his steps. His spurs chimed in the cozy space between the partitions. Shoulder to shoulder with Emmerich, he halted the revolver and set it on the counter. 

“Give that a try,” he said, as his gun rested by Emmerich's hand, silver and elegant next to the matte black Mark 23, like a temple neighboring a brutalist factory complex. 

Emmerich's head twisted back at him, giving him the feeling he'd startled an owl. “Yours? Are you sure?” 

“I wouldn't have offered otherwise,” he said, as amused as he was gratified by the engineer's awe. “Go on. See how it feels. Holding it yourself is a different world.”

Emmerich's hands understood that. They couldn't keep away for long. They stroked curiously along the barrel, as they had when the two of them had stood on Rex's shoulder, but now dared down farther to the curve of the handle and the wood polished by years of Ocelot's caress. When his hands moved away it was to resettle the ear protection over his head, and Ocelot felt a twinge of victory. 

He didn't grope for it carelessly, but took his time in settling the hilt into the hollow of his palm and curling his fingers around the handle and firming his grip into a secure embrace with his finger alongside the delicate oval of the trigger guard. Ocelot watched with the illicit thrill of seeing another man's hands on what you loved. 

“It's heavier,” Emmerich said. His movement into a shooting stance was already thoughtless. 

“It kicks harder, too.” The padding of the ear protection settled into place over Ocelot's ears. He pitched his voice to carry through it. “Keep your hand high on the grip.” 

Ocelot moved close behind him and lifted his arm to echo his. He laid his hand over Emmerich's and adjusted it, feeling the familiar shape of his weapon through the new medium of the engineer's body. Emmerich tried to turn and look at him. 

“Eyes on the target, Doctor.” He reached for his other hand and moved it up to the other side, where they joined around the grip. “Cover it with your supporting hand, like this. It'll help take the recoil.”

“Right,” Emmerich said, distracted by admiring the revolver. It looked different in his hands than in did in Ocelot's own. Bare, slim fingers on the wood and silver instead of the usual red gloves gave it the look of a painting in a new frame. 

“A beautiful piece of work, isn't it,” Ocelot said into the plastic over his ear. Emmerich's hair ran wild over his coat collar. Judging by the stubble texturing his face, his bouts of shaving were infrequent and indifferent. His voice smoothed into a low litany. “The design is a hundred and fifty years old, and it's still the best in the business. The Peacemaker, the Colt .45, the Gun That Won the West. It takes a lifetime to master, but simple enough at heart that anyone can make it sing. Like the old saying goes, 'God created men, and Sam Colt made them equal.'” 

“Oh, I get it,” Emmerich said. He lowered the weapon, and Ocelot's shadowing hands followed. “Because of factory wages.” 

At the same instant as he realized he was making a mistake, Ocelot said, “What?” 

“Something like this can be made piece by piece, right?” Emmerich said brightly. “Everybody gives Henry Ford the credit for that, but the idea of assembly lines actually came around a long time before him. Sam Colt must've been an early adopter. If you just have everybody doing their part and making the same thing over and over, going by the same design, the individual's skill doesn't matter as much, so you can pay everybody the same.” 

Ocelot said, “That doesn't have anything to do with-”

“No, think about it.” With his attention divided, the gun rested easily in Emmerich's hand. “If everybody's just doing one piece at a time, they don't really think about the gun they're making, and everybody contributes the same. It's kind of sad, though; it's faster and more fair, but you're not thinking, you're just following predetermined directions like a piece of code in a program. That's why a lot of those types of factory jobs are getting automated these days. So what it's saying is, 'Don't let your job turn you into a robot.'”

Silence fell in the range. The notices taped to the wall lifted their corners in the ventilation's breath. Ocelot's ears rang faintly. 

“Anyway,” Ocelot said, “Keep your thumbs down so you don't hit the cylinder release.”

Emmerich lifted the gun and adjusted his grip. “Like this?” 

Ocelot nudged his thumb into place. “There. Now cock it to the fourth position. You'll have to do that between each shot. The single action makes you a part of the mechanism.” 

The hammer bent back and beckoned. Every time, after all these years, the anticipation was as sharp as the snap of the clicks. Emmerich's gray eyes were intent on the sights. No matter how absent-minded a man might seem, holding a weapon brought his head down out of the clouds. Ocelot framed his body and steadied his arm with his thumb resting over his wrist. He felt the subtle expansion of his breath, and didn't have to feel his pulse to know it was quickening. 

“Focus on your breathing,” Ocelot said. The metal lifted in their combined grip gleamed. “Feel it. Forget everything but this moment and the weapon in your hand. The sights are your eyes. The trigger takes more force than the other; pull it and release in one smooth motion.” 

Emmerich didn't respond. He was far away, right where he should be, alone with Ocelot and the revolver. The gun pared away everything but them and the target like the skin of a fruit, and stripped them down to the flesh of what mattered. 

Behind his ear, knowing he would feel it in the vibration of his chest, Ocelot murmured, “Fire.” 

The shot cracked and drove his body into Ocelot's. More flinch than recoil, but there was nowhere for him to go. 

Ocelot didn't need to ask if he understood. It was all there in the awed lift of his eyebrows and the tenor of his, “Oh.” 

“You see, don't you,” Ocelot said. 

His fingers brushing the cylinder were reverent. “I think I get why you like this gun.” 

Ocelot's grip loosened to nothing but support, giving him full control and feeling the minute movements of the engineer's wrist as he corrected and maintained his aim. The muscles in his arm were virgin to this. “Again.”

The shots counted time's heartbeat. At three, the motion to pull back the hammer was natural. By five, his body was molding against Ocelot's and using him as a second backbone. At six, that final note like the chord at the end of a refrain, Ocelot showed him how to swing aside the loading gate and watched his thumb slide over the the ejector rod to make the empty casings clatter their song. He showed him how to load the bullets into each chamber and snap the loading gate closed, and come alive again. 

This round Ocelot rested his hand on his shoulder, close enough behind him at that each shot Hal's back pressed his bandolier to his chest. 

By the time the last shot echoed off the wall, Hal held the gun like it belonged to him. 

The click of the hammer on the empty chamber poured easy satisfaction through his limbs. Calling up the target was a grace note. 

“Every gun makes its own tune,” Ocelot said. “Your Rex will too, when she's ready.” 

Hal set the revolver on the counter. His fingers kissed the grip medallion goodbye before withdrawing. Ocelot's one regret as he took it up and spun it home into his holster was that his gloves didn't let through the residual warmth of his embrace. 

They both removed the protective gear and Hal backed out of the booth. He walked to the bench, the earmuffs around his neck making plastic clicks and rustles against his coat. He folded onto it and laid his head back against the wall with his greying hair splaying its wires over the cinderblock. Ocelot understood. An experience like that took some recovery. 

“Hey, Ocelot?”

“Hm?” Ocelot had one hand on the target and was calculating a time to bring him here again and work out the tendency of his aim to veer upwards. 

"Can you really start a fire with steel wool?"

Ocelot exhaled air through his nose. "Whatever you do, don't ask Miller that. He'll drag you into the woods and show you."

Emmerich lapsed back into thoughtful silence.

It was a minute later when he said, “You've worked with the boss for a while, right?” 

“We've had our time.” Now or then, in one guise or another, back to back or on the other side of the world. The width of a planet wasn't enough to block the force of his presence. 

“Does he ever do things that don't make any sense?”

A smile brushed Ocelot's lips. So he wasn't the only one who could never shoot a revolver without thinking of John. “Always.” 

“I mean, there's so many stories about all the things he's done, it's hard to even think of what he's like as just a person.”

"We're all willing to kill for him. Most of us have. We're willing to die for him, too.” He looked back and found Hal with a silent, downward expression. “Does that scare you?” 

“No.” His fingernail picked at a piece of fur adhered to his pant leg. Ocelot's trousers bore their own share of that. You couldn't get anywhere near those dogs without ending up wearing them. “It just seems sad.”

The bench creaked as Ocelot sat beside him. "It isn't. Plenty of people die for worse things than someone they love." 

It wasn't a word Ocelot spoke often. Saying it aloud to John would be as inane as stating the sky was still up.

Hal fell quiet and rubbed the side of his trigger finger with his thumb. “Right. Because he's a hero.”

“That's part of it.” Ocelot leaned back against the cold wall and gestured with an open hand. “Every story about him, true as they all may be, is only an attempt to describe the rest. It's only human to be drawn to the impossible.” 

“So nobody understands him.” The troubled disappointment was clear on Hal's face. He must have been hoping for a good, clear answer. When it came to John those were few and far between, and what you got instead was much more interesting.

“What I can tell you is that the rumors about his skills are no exaggeration. Snake, Saladin, Big Boss...every name he carries, he's earned. He's a physical genius, and his every move in battle is a virtuoso performance. He's one of the finest killers the world has ever known.” 

Hal's lips pressed pale. His eyes were on the one-eyed poster at the end of the lane.

Ocelot braced a hand on his knee and leaned in, his voice dropping to a conspirator's secret. “I can tell you one more thing.”

“Yeah?”

“He talks to cats.” 

His laugh was as startled as a deer darting out of cover. “Come on. I'm not _that_ gullible.” 

“Do I look like a man who tells jokes?” Ocelot's eyebrows made two white hooks. “If you see him with that cat who keeps the mice out of the vents, don't interrupt them.” 

No matter what unclear spots there might be left in Ocelot's memory, one thing he would never forget was the sight of John locking his eye with a cat perched on a crate in the storage room and intoning _uh-huh_ at a regular pace. He'd left before he was seen. He hadn't had anything to contribute to the conversation.

It wasn't the first time he'd overheard things about the animal. Once it had been soldiers having a long debate over what to call it, arguing that they couldn't name it after some television show spy because its voice wasn't right, until eventually, thanks to how it looked ancient, ragged, and strangely indestructible, they had settled on Keith Richards. Ocelot kept up a pretense of not knowing that another suggestion had been _Revolver_. 

Hal was resettling the glasses that pinned his hair to his temple. “It's hard to imagine him being normal enough to do anything that strange. The weirdest thing is how you almost forget about all the stories when you talk to him.” 

There was no mistaking the note in his voice. Well, well. For all Miller's efforts, it was the boss he was developing a crush on. The only real surprise was that it had taken so long. Among those of them with the privilege of being here at his side, admiration for the boss was standard issue. As something they all had in common, it was more advantage than conflict.

“That's his best trick. He's just a man, like anyone else. He isn't invincible, and even the experts in their business make mistakes.” His lip twitched under his mustache. “Then he breaks a fortress single-handed, and you start to wonder again.” 

“You've seen him do that?” Hal looked somewhere between impressed and unnerved, an expression John had a lion's share of provoking in the world. 

“I had a front-row seat,” Ocelot said, with the old fondness in his voice and his revolver spinning around his finger. 

The motorcycle snarling under him, the acrid smell of the Shagohod's burning fuel, and the roar of the collapsing tunnel had stayed clear above the waterline of his memory despite the rising tide of years and the self-induced erosion. As malleable as minds were, no technique was perfect. The effects were not only negative, in the expected loss of pieces of fact, but positive, in the places where the doublethink doubled back and the mind compensated by adding fragments of delusion. To this day there were false images embedded in his memory like shrapnel in healed flesh. He could picture, clear as reality, the silent boy in black floating in front of Sahelanthropus's husk, the muzzle of the mask lifting and falling as the tinny voice of a child said _I wasn't here before_ with a monaural rattle like small stones, and Ocelot's larynx spoke alone to echo 'You were always here,' as sure as ice is heavier than water. The damage he'd done to his memory left a sensory scar in the shape of a thin hand covered in a long sleeve slipping into his grasp and remaining there while the display of the base in front of his eyes vanished and switched inputs to a wide white red-marked plain, and in the sound of his boots tapping over the surface of their shared birthplace while the boy told him where their memory waited. It lingered in the unrecorded echo of 'You can't look ahead' in his own voice, and _It's already happened_ in the boy's reply, and the metallic whisper of his breath as he spoke about a future that had taken place three generations ago. Hallucination was a small price to pay. 

“Everything people say about him always comes back to fighting,” Hal said. 

“You've been asking about him?” 

“Mostly I just overhear things, since people tend to forget I'm there,” he said blithely. “Unless it's about Rex, nobody pays much attention to me, except for you and Commander Miller lately.”

A flick of Ocelot's wrist tossed the revolver from hand to hand and drew Hal's eye. Now he had some idea of the skill it took to maneuver its weight. That was always the drawback to being good enough to make things look easy; people without a frame of reference didn't realize they should be impressed.

“It's true that he can kill a man with his bare hands in a dozen ways, but do you know the most dangerous part of him?” Ocelot snapped the revolver still and tapped the muzzle against his lips with a kiss of still-warm metal. “His mouth.” 

Hal's eyes flicked rapidly back to the far wall. “Oh. Uh, how do you figure?”

The gun resumed its revolutions. “He has a way of talking. I've seen him walk into a cell with a prisoner, and walk out ten minutes later with a lifelong ally. No one can say for sure how he does it, only that when he talks to you...”

“You want to believe in him,” Hal finished quietly. 

“Mhm. You've felt it, haven't you.” 

His nod was enough. For a moment there was no sound but the revolver's steady hum through the air. 

“Speaking of Miller,” Ocelot said, “he and I have something of a competition.” 

“A competition?” His attention shifted to Ocelot's face.

“Personal procurement projects. We try to find special items for the boss, sometimes contraband.”

“Like what? I mean, if it's not classified.” 

He brought the gun to a halt. “Casu marzu.”

Hal's brows creased. “That's not a weapon I've ever heard of.”

“It's a cheese. It's fermented...well, 'rotten' is more the word. Selling it falls into a legal gray area even in Italy and it's banned outright in the US, but that's easy enough to get around if you grease the right palms. The hard part is importing it without the maggots dying along the way.”

Horrified fascination wrote itself over his eyes. “Tell me you at least take the maggots out first.”

“He didn't.” 

Hal's face was caught between a laugh and a wince. “That's disgusting.” 

“I know.” God, did he know. “He was crazy for it. Surströmming, sheep's eyes, balut, a jar of some kind of rotted squid guts Miller dug up... In all these years, we haven't found a single thing he won't eat.”

“And you keep looking?” 

“Of course. There's not a man here who wouldn't do anything in the world for him.” 

That would have been enough, really. Maybe what called for that one last thing was the same inclination that had brought them here and had had him lend him his weapon; the simple urge of a human to share his joy. 

“There's another thing I can tell you about him,” Ocelot said, his thumb stroking back and forth along the side of the grip. “There are men he's killed, and men he's saved.” 

“They say he's saved the world.” The words that would have sounded absurd if they were about anyone but John.

“More personal than that. There have been times he had his enemy at his mercy. Anyone else would have put a bullet between their eyes.” He mimed a shot downrange. “Problem solved. Instead, he protected them, just because he saw something in them. He brought them home and gave them something worth fighting for.” 

“Oh.” Hal's voice implied he had some grasp of how rare that was, though of course he didn't know the half of it. His chin rested on his hand and he looked off at the perforated target. “I wonder if I've ever run into anybody like that.” 

“You know two of them.” Ocelot holstered his revolver as he stood. He swept up his coat and pulled it around his shoulders. His steps toward the door clicked his boots on the tile.

“Reconsider that gun, Doctor. You're an endangered species.” Compassion was as rare as someone who could love a one-eyed wolf. Ocelot would have to thank Miller for drawing his attention to him, and annoy him doubly by being sincere. “It would be a shame to let it die out.”

* * *

When Hal saw the flat, square box on his desk between the mug full of pencils and the EMS model, his first thought was that it was something somebody had left behind by mistake. Opening it, though, proved it must be for him. The gloves were exactly his size.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter owes a lot to helpful gun videos on Youtube.  
> Some easter eggs in this one. Porn in the next.  
> As always, you can find me over at https://higharollakockamamie.tumblr.com/


	8. [6.1] Summit

The Commander was down in the lab to check on their progress again. Hal filled him in on how the railgun was coming along, and crowded the mixed feelings that came with getting told “good work” out of his mind by filling it with calculations instead. He was faintly aware of the sound of the door swooshing shut, and more aware of the sound of heels tapping toward him. It was Courtney, who slammed the heels of her hands down the desk and said, “What did you do?” 

Hal's typing didn't slow. He wanted to get this down before he forgot. “About the railgun?” 

Courtney exhaled air through her nose the way people did sometimes when they thought Hal was messing around with them, even when he was just answering a question. 

“About the Commander and Ocelot.” 

“Huh?” There, that was the important part done. “Nothing.” 

“Come on. It used to be you hardly ever saw Ocelot down here, and the Commander came in three times a week like clockwork. Now hardly a day goes by that one of them isn't around here to talk to you.” 

“Rex is at an important stage in development,” Hal said. He resettled his glasses on his nose. “Did you work out that issue with stabilizing the-” 

“They probably figure he's embezzling laser parts,” said Kevin, spinning slowly around in his chair.

“What? Why would I even-” 

“Or that he narced to OSHA about the furnace room.” 

“That really should have some railings,” Courtney said. 

“I didn't do anything,” Hal said. “They're interested in Rex, that's all.” 

The door to the section beeped in the sequence that meant a security card was going through the reader on the other side. Within three seconds, everybody was back at their desk (though Courtney nearly knocked his mug of pencils over on the way). Within five, Big Boss was walking between the consoles. 

“Doctor Emmerich,” he said. “How's that program coming?” 

A while later, after Big Boss had nodded through an explanation of the moves and watched some models of what Rex would be able to do, the door closed behind him and Hal turned back to his work. He noticed that there was no other sound of typing in the room. When he looked up, all eyes were on him.

Courtney said, “What did you _do_?”

* * *

Hal was determined to find out. 

Commander Miller was the one he found first. He was easy to spot, since he was out on the path between buildings, kneeling on a soldier's back. 

“Now,” he was saying pleasantly, “what did we learn?” 

“Always be aware of the surroundings, Master Miller!” the man pinned under him shouted at the pavement. He didn't sound like he had a lot of breath to spare to do it. 

“And what are we going to do?” 

“Always check between buildings, Master Miller!” 

“Good boy.” Miller patted him on the back with his metal hand. He wore a tank top despite the chill that made Hal keep his hands in his pockets even with gloves on, and his prosthetic arm gleamed in the sun. 

The ponytail down his back swayed as he hopped to his feet. He spotted Hal approaching and broke into a broad smile.

“Afternoon, Hal,” he said, dusting his hands off. “Did you want to see how to start a fire with steel wool like you were asking about?” 

“Maybe later.” He really was curious about that. “There's something else I wanted to talk to you about.” 

They walked a circuit around the yard. The sun glinting off the commander's arm must have made him distinctive even from a distance; you could see the soldiers on patrol straightening up when they looked toward him. “What's bothering you?” 

He had a loping, businesslike stride that it took some effort to keep up with. Hal couldn't think of any smart way to work around to it, so he just got right to the point. 

“I want to know what's going on with you three. All of a sudden you all keep coming down to the lab, talking to me, being nice to me... Is it something to do with Rex?”

Miller's steps slowed. “The boss too?” 

It was hard to admit getting Big Boss's attention. It felt half like bragging and half like betraying a secret. “Yeah. He's been coming around sometimes.” 

He'd been acting so friendly and natural that Hal couldn't figure out whether he was pretending he'd never kissed him or if to him it wasn't something that needed discussion, like he kissed everybody. For all Hal knew, he did. 

Miller stopped abruptly, and Hal overshot him and had to backtrack.

“The sun is setting later every day,” the commander said. He looking upwards, and a point of light flashed off his sunglasses. “Soon it won't set at all.”

Hal tried to get a handle his expression, but it was hard to judge with part covered. “Commander?” 

Miller shook his head, his ponytail sweeping his back. 

“It's about something one of a kind, but not Rex. We haven't been fair to you, Hal. It's time to come clean.” It was his left hand that clapped Hal on the shoulder, but he still staggered. “Meet us in my office at nineteen hundred.” 

He walked away whistling that same old song.

* * *

It was time to strategize. 

“This has been going on long enough. He's catching on, and it's time to let him- Boss, why are you here?” 

“Arbitration,” Big Boss said, and ate a grape from the bowl on Kaz's desk. “Plus, I want to see how this turns out.” 

Ocelot stroked the grip of his gun. Someone who didn't know him well might consider the gesture a threat. Someone who did could tell you that it was as idle as cracking his knuckles, and that Ocelot wasn't the kind of amateur who gave warning. “If you're willing to take this step, Miller, you're admitting defeat.” 

“We never said it had to be a secret. It's only fair to let him know the choice he's making.” 

“I said you were forfeiting, not that I was planning to stop you.” He spun the revolver on his finger, the old thwip-thwip-thwip that was a part of their home base's background noise as much as the way the ventilation rattled when the wind was strong. “Things are starting to interfere with Rex's schedule. I've heard from Baker that Emmerich went over his head to get approval for new features.” 

“Only one, and it was brilliant,” Big Boss said. 

“I'm not forfeiting,” said Kaz. “It's still his call. But don't look at me to keep every single engineer on task. I have enough trouble trying to keep the others from cobbling together monstrosities. There's one who keeps trying to get funding for putting a silencer on a rocket launcher.” 

“That guy's had some good ideas.” 

“Anyway,” Ocelot cut in before they could get off track, “how do you plan on making the approach?” 

“This is a delicate situation.” Kaz's metal fingers curled and uncurled, a habit that lingered from back when he'd gotten the thing. “We have to bring up the subject carefully, or we risk scaring him off. We need to consider this from every angle, cover every detail, and work out a plan. We're going to be delicate, and do this right.”

* * *

When the fall of darkness and distant hooting of owls signaled the change of the guard, Hal reported to the Commander's office just as he'd been told to. He made his way across the base with curiousity humming along the surface of his brain, and walked straight into the triangle made by three men in FOXHOUND coats. 

Miller said, “Evening, Hal.” 

Ocelot said, “We have something to discuss with you.”

Miller said, “Pablo Neruda once wrote-” 

Big Boss said, “Do you want to have sex with us?” 

“God damn it, Boss,” Miller sighed. 

Hal's brain jammed up and blinked an emergency light. He looked from each of them to the other and back again. “You mean, like, in a row?” 

“If that's what you want,” said Big Boss. One hand was in his coat pocket. “We could do it all at once, too. It's nothing we haven't done before.” 

“You all...?” His operating system was going to have to reboot. It might take a minute. “That's what all this was about?” 

“Guilty as charged,” said Ocelot, who had a kind of pride in that word. 

“I'm afraid so,” said Miller. 

“Yep,” said Big Boss.

“You mean the three of you are...” Hal blinked rapidly. “I thought that was just a rumor, like when that one guy said he saw you eating a squirrel the other day.” 

Big Boss's face stiffened. “That's ridiculous. I wouldn't do that.” 

“The point is,” Miller interjected smoothly “the offer's on the table. Say no, and it'll be like nothing ever happened. It's all up to you. Take some time to think about it.” 

“This early in the year they're still stringy.” 

“Okay,” Hal said. 

Miller nodded. “Let us know what you decide.” 

His hands darted into quick gestures. “No, I mean; okay. To all of it.” 

Five eyes regarded him.

Ocelot's mustache moved in the way that, Hal thought, meant he was thinking about smiling. 

“I told you he had potential. You know everything by the way a man holds a gun.”

* * *

Even with the card Big Boss had put into his hand, getting to his quarters wasn't easy. It meant getting through half a dozen keypads, a thumbprint scan, and at one point an actual door hidden behind a bookcase. Hal was starting to think he was going to run into a puzzle from Myst, or one of those adventure games where you had to combine a lot of things together until something worked, and you'd probably die a half dozen times along the way. No wonder Ocelot had made him repeat the route back to him until he had it perfect. He was just glad they must have changed the guard patrols around to clear it for him. He _could_ explain what he was doing there to somebody, but he really, really didn't want to.

 _Oh, yeah, I'm authorized to be here, I'm on my way to a foursome._ Was that the word? What was the cutoff before it counted as an orgy? He could just call it a rendezvous with three extremely attractive older men. Why was everyone on this base so beautiful? What if he'd misunderstood somehow, and it wasn't what he thought at all? 

Before Hal knew it, he was in a cold, white hall in front of a door that looked just like any of the others, except for the name plate by it. Before he could reconsider the night, his career, and the rest of his life, he knocked. 

The door slid open. The part of him that had half expected complicated vaults and hydraulics was obscurely disappointed. When he stepped in it shut behind him, and the lock beeped. 

Walking into Big Boss's quarters was like moving a world away from the rest of the base. It was all earth tones and warm wood. The three of them were sitting around a heavy, dark wood table that looked expensive and also seemed to have a couple bullet holes in it. Miller was on one side, his metal hand resting on the table, while Ocelot was on the other with his bandolier hung over the back of the chair, like a page of an old Western novel spliced into something by Phillip K. Dick. Not the one about Nazis and the I Ching. One with robots. 

“There's our guest of honor,” Big Boss said. He was standing behind Ocelot with his hand resting on his shoulder. 

“Hey,” Hal said, and that was about as intelligent as he was going to get.

Miller swept some papers from the table into a folder without looking. Even here, he was in sunglasses. He caught Hal with a smile. “You came.” 

“I told you he would,” Ocelot said. “No one turns down an invitation from the boss.” 

“You do this a lot?” Hal couldn't help asking.

“Not for a while,” Big Boss said. “You're something special.” 

That was flattering in a way Hal's brain couldn't handle. 

Once, the pair of soldiers patrolling the lab had been having a long conversation. Even though he only overheard a couple sentences each lap it had been easy to follow, because most of it was one guy just repeating in dazed wonder, “He said I did good. Real ability, he called it. The boss did,” and the other saying, patiently, “I know, Armadillo.” Hal hadn't understood until now. 

Miller unfolded up out of the chair. His metal arm was jointed with delicate seams. Hal hadn't been able to feel those, when his arm lay over his; only the cool of the metal and the weight. 

“There's one thing we haven't discussed,” Miller said. For a voice that could boom across half the base, it could get low and friendly. “And that's who gets to kiss you first.” 

“Actually...” Big Boss said, looking something that wasn't quite sheepish.

“God _damn_ it, Boss,” Miller said, and rubbed his temples. 

“He had a good idea for Rex,” Big Boss explained, in a way that gave Hal a strange pride. “Couldn't help it.” 

“In that case,” Miller said, “It's my turn next.”

Miller's kiss was bright as a handful of sunlight. He dipped Hal down like a dancing partner, and kept him up with his metal arm. He didn't even have a chance to catch his breath from that before he was caught up in Ocelot's lips. His mustache tickled his face, and it was over before he'd had anywhere near enough. Ocelot handed him right to the Boss, and, well, that was when he learned he hadn't had a real chance to appreciate him at all before. 

The first time it had just been enthusiasm. This time, it was _thorough._ His tongue explored along his mouth, along the edges of his teeth, easy as if he owned the place. Hal had to grab onto him just to stay up, and it was like holding onto an oak branch while the ground dropped farther and farther away.

“Boss,” he gasped, when he first had breath to do anything. “Boss, I...wow.” 

“Hold on,” Ocelot said. 

“Hold onto wh- oh!” That came when he was slung over Big Boss's shoulder.

“Go easy on him, boss,” Miller said, and Hal would have been grateful if he could have been anything but dizzy at the moment. A kiss from the boss was a thing that had aftershocks.

“Quit worrying, I've got him.” 

It was a bad time to remember that once Courtney had sighed that Big Boss's code name should have been Silver Fox. She wasn't wrong, though. He smelled a little like cologne and a lot like leather, since Hal's face was right in his coat. By the shoulder under him, it wasn't just the clothes that made him look broad. He could feel that it was solid muscle, if it wasn't already obvious from how he walked like he wasn't carrying anything heavier than a housecat.

The world flipped back up when he tossed Hal onto a bed, and the rush of blood to and from his head was only half of what made his head spin.

“You could ask before the next time you throw somebody around, Boss,” he said. 

“I could,” Big Boss acknowledged. He was undoing his tie.

“He won't,” said Ocelot.

The size of the bed bore out what they'd said about this being a habit. Judging by the rest of the room, it wouldn't be this size without a reason. The three men around him were taking up most of his attention, but Hal had to take the chance to get a glimpse of their leader's sanctuary. For being one of the most powerful men in the world – a war hero, a leader, a member of the Illuminati if you believed those chain emails that made a really big deal about how the pyramid on the dollar bill had one eye – his rooms were on the plain side. It smelled expensive, like fancy leather, but there were no photographs or art on the walls, and not much on the bookshelf besides a couple volumes about identifying plants and animals. The shelves also had a couple little metal boxes with serious electronic locks that made Hal's hands itch in the same way seeing an unsolved sudoku puzzle did. Something must have been brought in recently, since there was a flattened cardboard box tucked behind the bookshelf. He leaned over the side of the bed to get a better look at something on the floor that was, on closer inspection, furry. 

“Huh,” he said, “a bearskin rug?” 

“That a surprise?” Big Boss said. 

“It's just weird to think of a guy like you being normal enough to be tacky.” 

“I told you, Boss,” Miller said, voice rich and amused. His lips were curved beneath his sunglasses. It was surreal to think that Hal had kissed them. That that was part of the taste lingering in his mouth. He realized, with the hum of a strange and new excitement, that he was going to get to again. 

“It's classic,” said Ocelot. 

Ocelot tugged his gloves off. He slapped the pair of them together and set them on a chest of drawers as he went to a panel on the wall. He brushed the backs of his fingers down one part of it, and the lights dimmed. Hal was confused about that until, for the first time he'd ever even heard of, Miller took off his sunglasses. For a second there was something vulnerable about him, there with the glasses caught between his fingers and his eyes closed. That wasn't a word you ever thought of as applying to a man who the soldiers were always complaining ran them ragged. 

_(“Hey, hold up, will you?” The pair on patrol clopped around the lab behind Hal slower than usual. “I'm sore places I didn't know you could_ get _sore.”_

_“Let me guess. Somebody pissed off the Hell Master.” The red-headed woman soldier didn't sound surprised._

_“All Ibis did was ask for some slack at the climbing wall, cause he's injured...”_

_“Uh-oh.”_

_“Yeah. But Miller didn't lecture or anything. He was real cheerful about it.”_

_“Not a good sign, Johnny.”_

_“Well I know that _now_. He just goes, 'Injured, huh! That kind of thing is bound to slow you down.' And then...”_

_“He did the arm thing, didn't he.”_

_“He takes his arm off! The whole thing, _kachunk!_ And he goes 'Hold this,' and drops it right Hippo's hands.” _

_“That's when you're in for it.”_

_“Then, a couple steps away, he goes, 'Oh, that's not fair, is it.' And he takes his foot off! And he goes, 'Hold this, too'! Then he_ hops _to the wall!”_

_“You poor bastards.”_

_“He said he'd do his best to get to the top. And since he was slowed down so much, we'd have to run a lap for every second we were behind.”_

_“I hope you hurried.”_

_“You bet your ass I did! But when he gets up there, he isn't even breathing hard.”_

_“Of course he isn't.”_

_“He just goes straight into yelling, 'If you're hurting, fine! Hurt and keep going!'”_

_“So how many laps did you end up doing?”_

_The groan faded as they walked behind a wall. “I don't want to talk about it.”)_

The commander's eyes opened pale. Not your usual thin color, but milky like cataracts, though he never moved like someone who had any trouble seeing. When Miller brought the clipboard close to his face and frowned at the numbers, Hal had always thought that was just him being annoyed at how much Rex's screws cost. You couldn't just get normal ones, and it wasn't something their own foundry had molds for, so they had to be specially shipped in and that added up, since delivery for anything up here to Alaska was ridiculous. Hal thought of that, and of those blind fighters like Zatoichi or that one guy from Neuromancer, before he got the connection between the omnipresent sunglasses and Ocelot turning down the lights. 

Miller's metal hand folded the sunglasses closed and tucked them into his pocket. Hal sat up, his hands sinking into the mattress behind him, and said, “Woah. That's different.”

“I've had the condition for a while,” Miller said.

Hal waved his hand quickly. “No, not that, I mean that you have...the rest of a face.” 

Miller's lip had been drawing down, but then something pulled up the corner like an ambush. “You thought I didn't?” 

“It's a surprise the first time,” said Big Boss. 

“Knowing and seeing is different,” said Hal. 

Naturally, he was good-looking with the sunglasses on, but seeing his eyes completed the picture and gave it new depth. He was handsome, Hal realized, in an immediate way, with crow's feet around his eyes that made him look like someone you might meet in the real world, not just like someone looking over a row of parts and making marks on a checklist or shouting at a squad of people doing pushups, but someone who could be weighing tomatoes next to you at a farmer's market. The rumor was that he was in his fifties, and it was easier to believe, seeing his face as a whole – not that he was any age in specific, but that time applied to him. 

“You should feel honored. Our shy commander hasn't shown anyone else his eyes in years.” 

Ocelot, on the other hand, looked like he'd been born an old man. There was a rumor that he was actually Lee Van Cleef, who'd picked up genuine gunplay skills on movie sets and faked his own death so he could go use them for real.

 _(”That's why he wears gloves all the time,”_ Hal had heard from the table behind him in the mess hall. _”So nobody sees he's missing the last bit of his right middle finger._ ”

 _”Counterpoint, Mallard: everybody wears gloves all the time, because it's cold as fuck.”)_

He was handsome too, in his own way. Time had etched character into his face, and when you looked at him, you could see everyone he had ever been. 

Miller removed his coat with a sigh, right arm out of the sleeve first, then left. Big Boss shrugged his off like an animal shaking off water. Ocelot took off his with a flourish like a bullfighter, or like something a camera would catch in an instant's slow motion. They each hung up theirs on a coatrack, moving with a sureness that said there was a hook designated as theirs. The holsters came off, too. Miller's was over his shoulder, like a policeman, on the side his regular arm could reach. Ocelot's must have been heavy to wear with two of those revolvers weighing it down, judging by the heft just the one had had in Hal's hand. He lifted the bandoleer off his shoulder last. Big Boss's gun had a sizable knife for company. It wasn't really anything to be unnerved by, though, since they said he could kill somebody seventy-four ways with his bare hands anyway. It wasn't as though he could get any _more_ dangerous. 

( _“Come on, that many don't even exist.” “I swear it's true.” “Okay, go ahead, list some.” “There's plenty if you count the different kinds of choking separate.”_ ) 

They all had their own hooks for their weapons, too. 

“He looks lonely, Ocelot,” Big Boss said. 

“He does,” Ocelot agreed. 

Hal's hands sank into the sheets of the mattress behind his back. Ocelot's eyes were heavy on him. It was strangely fascinating to see them all in different levels of dress, like the reverse of watching the stages of Rex as the armor was built onto her. He leaned close, looked at him so steadily that Hal felt like a code he was trying to crack, and then plucked Hal's glasses off his face. 

"There we are," he said, and Hal blinked at the blurry image of him setting them aside. 

Ocelot's knee sank into the mattress when he leaned over and kissed him with his booted heel sticking up, and it would have taken a stronger man than Hal to resist the urge to flick the spur so it spun. He could feel Ocelot's laugh against his lips. He thought of having Ocelot's body nested against him, bracing him when he was shooting his revolver. It wasn't so different. 

“You call that a kiss?” said Miller. 

Ocelot looked up, irritated like a cat pet against the grain. “I'd like to see you do better.” 

“Gladly,” the commander said from behind Hal. Both hands crossed over his chest from above and pulled him back into a nearly upside-down kiss. He didn't have a mustache to brush Hal's skin, but there was a scrape of stubble around his lips. 

Ocelot was taking his boots off and not bothering to watch in a deliberate way. Big Boss came over, pulling his tie over his head and dropping it on the floor on the way. He leaned on one knee on the bed by Ocelot and said, “You're looking lonely, too.” 

Ocelot's head tilted to the side, but it was Big Boss who closed the distance. Hal watched them with his fingers stroking over the back of Miller's hand, and thought again of Rex without her armor. 

“There's a rarer sight than the Loch Ness monster,” the commander murmured in Hal's ear. “Revolver Ocelot has a heart.” 

“What are you telling him, Miller?” Ocelot said, with Big Boss's face an inch away, and his eyes open to slits. 

“All your secrets,” the commander said, and opened up Hal's shirt. 

They said it jokingly, but when Ocelot looked at Big Boss, his usually unreadable face wore an adoration so open it seemed wrong for an outsider to see. Hal had to remind himself that this was somewhere he'd been brought, not a place he'd snuck into. There was something voyeuristic about seeing reverence like that. As odd as he'd thought it to hear Ocelot's harsh voice talking about love, with the warmth in Big Boss's eye looking back at him, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world. Ocelot and Big Boss rested their foreheads against one another, and there was a history there that Hal couldn't begin to guess at. Strange to see from outside, when two people forgot there was anybody else in the world. 

Miller was undoing Hal's buttons. His hand was amazing at fine work. Hal knew by experience now that the prosthetic was a metropolis of tiny moving parts, and knew by extrapolation the hundreds of hours of ingenuity and care that must have gone into making them soundless, and the hours of practice that must have gone into being able to flick each button loose without knocking it across the room. He shrugged his shirt off into the commander's grasp, and as he was twisting to pull his arm out of the sleeve and was just about to think about what he was doing long enough to be embarrassed, he caught sight of the label on an olive drab crate shoved against the wall- 

“Is that a _grenade launcher_?” 

“Well yeah,” Big Boss said as Ocelot kissed his throat. “Where else would you keep it?” 

It was one of a lot of things Hal learned that night that he never could have guessed. He had lived on the base for months, and knew to take the left path around the blast furnace that had better footing and kept you out of the way, and that the alarms got checked on the first Wednesday of the month, and exactly how long it took the shower to run out of hot water. He didn't know what that one soldier did to keep getting put on cleaning duty, or the running joke that all the other techs seemed to have, or why a bunch of the soldiers hated somebody named Jody, or what it'd take to get anybody to look at him for a minute, or whether he'd really want them to. But now he knew that when Commander Miller let his hair down he pulled the elastic free and tossed his head in a way so much like one of those eighties music videos sexy librarians that he had to wonder if it was on purpose. He knew that Ocelot's came down with one pull and fell long and straight over his shoulders. 

He knew that when Big Boss saw where he was looking, he leaned in and murmured, “He does that on purpose.” 

He also knew that Big Boss kept heavy artillery by his bed like a pair of slippers, and that when he undressed it was in movements as rapid and unwasted as the way you imagined he would dismantle a gun. The commander took off his clothes with leisurely self-possession, and Ocelot was a show; he was the kind of person whose movements had built-in flourish. He tossed his shirt off like a magician tossing a rose as a distraction. It worked, too; Hal was paying so much attention to that that it took him a minute to notice that all three of them were around him naked. 

Ocelot didn't have much in the way of scars, but Big Boss and the commander made up for it. There were pink slashes and white pockmarks and jagged rips, and a faint line across Big Boss's torso that looked like an alien's first attempt at an S. That couldn't have been an accident. Someone, Hal thought with a sudden sadness, must have held him down. In their business, living to their age was an achievement. 

Also? They were all in good shape for old guys. Really, really good shape. Hal couldn't stop looking at all the hard planes of muscle and the scars across them, some with self-explanatory origins and some he couldn't begin to guess at. He tried to remember the only other time he'd ever seen a body marked so much, and that was how he ended up in the bed of one of the world's most dangerous men and some good candidates for rank two and three, looking at them all naked and trying not to think about Trigun. 

“Wow,” said Hal. 

The commander put his metal hand on his hip and said, “Here, get my good side.” 

Hal hadn't even liked Trigun that much. He didn't see much of a point to the ones that didn't have giant robots, but when you were dealing with boxes of old VHS tapes, you took what you could get. 

Hal came closer for a better look at the seam where the material anchored to the flesh of his upper arm, and said, “I'm getting it.” 

The commander sat on the bed with his leg folded under him, with a grace and flexibility that would have been remarkable even if that leg hadn't ended in another work of human craftsmanship. Every bit of it was articulated. 

He'd even watched all of Chobits. Why had _anybody_ ever watched all of Chobits? 

Miller knitted his hands together and stretched out his arms, silver fingers interlocked with flesh ones. You could see the subtle points of asymmetry between the two sides of him in how the muscles curved. Maybe that was part of why he was so strict about keeping himself in condition; every time he lost or gained weight, the difference would show. When his arms came down Big Boss was there behind him. He stroked his hand down the silver one, and Hal could see Miller relax against him. Big Boss's hands moved to Miller's chest, and a look from him gave Hal clearance to do what he'd been wanting to do for ages, and take Miller's hand in his. The metal was cool, but with the way Miller was holding it, it didn't feel heavy, but full of life and potential. He could feel the threadlike seams of the joints when he pressed his lips to the palm. 

“He likes that arm,” Big Boss's voice said above him, while he sucked on a finger and felt it curl gently in his mouth. 

“That was Miller's advantage from the start,” said Ocelot from on the bed behind Hal, running the five fingertips of an unexpectedly soft hand down his back. Must have been from wearing gloves all the time. 

“A poor workman blames his tools,” said Miller, the vibration of his voice carrying very subtly through the metal. Hal had always thought that was an unfair saying. Of course somebody poor wouldn't be able to afford very good tools, and if you didn't hire them because of that, they'd never have the cash to upgrade, so really it was a critique about capitalism. He didn't have the chance to say so, though, not while he was sucking on Miller's fingers. They tasted like metal and snow. 

“I never understood why you took the lighter out of that thing,” Big Boss said. 

“It made the joint finicky, and it was annoying to have to keep filling up the kerosene.” Miller's other hand was resting on Hal's neck, where his thumb brushed the fringe of his hair and set a warmth that spread slowly down Hal's spine. “Besides, I'm not a Swiss Army knife, Boss.” 

Big Boss made a noise like he'd heard that before, but Hal wasn't paying much attention, because while he was busy kissing that hand and wrist, Ocelot's were undoing his pants. Hal held onto Miller's forearm to anchor himself – turned out you could put a lot of weight on it – and lifted his hips to help get them pulled out from under him. 

The idea of being naked didn't quite sink in until he met Big Boss's eye. 

Big Boss said, “He's pretty cute.” 

Hal didn't say anything to that, because nothing could make your brain lock up until you pulled up the task manager and ended some processes like the guy people said had once hunted a dinosaur and turned its bones into a slingshot calling you cute. 

Ocelot tossed his pants over where they landed on the grenade launcher case, and Big Boss said, “Now we can get started.” 

Hal said, “We weren't started?” 

Ocelot said, “You haven't seen anything yet.” 

That was proven when Big Boss pounced on him, with a special sort of quickness that the eye barely processed and that never gave the brain a chance. He knocked Hal flat on his back and kept going with a kiss full of a wildman's passion. Hal's hand grabbed for his back and could barely get purchase. The thing that knocked sense out of his head, the crucial defining thing, turned out to be not as qualitative as quantitative. That is, it wasn't so much that this was a naked Big Boss, it was that there was _so much_ naked Big Boss. Hal had the feeling that from Ocelot or Miller's viewpoint, he was just a flattened place in the mattress right now. 

He liked it. 

“Don't I get a turn, Boss?” the commander's voice said, and a hand on Big Boss's shoulder pulled him to the side so he was diagonal across Hal and could turn his face toward Miller. You could see the breath the commander took all through his body, in the rise of both shoulders, when they kissed, and Big Boss wrapped his hand securely around the metal arm. 

Hal reached out blindly for something to grab onto, and what he got was Ocelot's wrist. 

They each kissed differently, Hal learned. Big Boss dove in and overwhelmed you like a battering ram. Miller took it slow and built up gradually, being a gentleman except when he nipped. Ocelot teased. He got you going and then pulled back so you just had the brush of his mustache, and you had to follow to try to catch more. Before he knew it, he was on his knees kissing a reclining Ocelot, while Big Boss took something out of a drawer and said, “Do the honors.” 

Hal didn't know what he was talking about until he glanced over his shoulder and saw Miller squeezing something from a tube onto his fingers. He didn't get to look long before Ocelot put his hand on his face and turned it back toward him. He really did like attention as much as a cat. 

Ocelot's hand on his face was a lot warmer than the metal one that rested on Hal's lower back and made him jump. 

“Don't worry,” Miller said, stroking his hip. The sensation wasn't bad, if you were expecting it. “I'll use my real hand. I wouldn't put the fingers on that one into somebody if I care how they feel.” 

Ocelot's brows met, and he shot a look at him across Hal. “You put that in me all the time.” 

“Like I said.” 

What was pushing into Hal was definitely flesh and and blood. 

“C, commander!” Hal gasped, fingers scrabbling at Ocelot and finding purchase on his pectoral. 

“Please,” Miller said, voice rich with amusement, “when my pants are off, it's 'Benedict.'” 

“He still likes 'Commander,'” Big Boss confided, and kissed him too. His beard was rougher than the tickle of Ocelot's mustache, and Hal had too much else to think about to be shy. 

If anybody ever asked him what the Boss was like, he would say; _he does things like he means them_. 


	9. [6.2] Summit

When Miller's fingers made him twitch, it was Ocelot who held him steady, and Big Boss who swallowed his gasps. 

With his glasses off they blurred into soft-edged shapes, and without the distraction of detail you could see clear how differently they moved. A blind man could have told them apart by their hands. Miller, his metal hand stroking little cool paths on Hal's hip and his flesh one making Hal's toes curl, Ocelot's smooth ones holding onto his forearms, Big Boss's rough ones stroking over him so he could feel every scar on his skin. 

Miller's fingers moved smoothly and confidently, and Hal found himself grabbing onto Big Boss's hand and making weird little yelps into Ocelot's chest. He kept having surreal moments where he remembered that this was the guy who had trained the hero who took down Vermon CaTaffy at Fortress Fanatic, not just a guy he was about to have sex with. 

“He's an eager one, sir,” Ocelot said. 

“We'll have to make it worth his while,” said Big Boss. His hand was rough and textured with scars. There was a little white dent of one in the place between his thumb and forefinger, like he'd been bitten by a small animal a long time ago. 

“Ready, Hal?” Benedict said. 

He gulped his way through a few different kinds of sounds before he got to _yes_. 

It went without saying that Big Boss would go first. 

Hal was braced by hands from so many different directions that it made it hard to judge where gravity was coming from. Big Boss rested a hand on his back and took Benedict's place behind him.

It was the metal hand Hal buried his face against. 

“Take it slow, Boss,” Benedict said, but Hal shook his head against the cool metal and said it was okay, he was okay, just go. 

It wasn't that Big Boss was violent, doing this. It was just that he wasn't the kind of person whose body had any notion of how to hold back. Maybe when you lived by physical force that long, you forgot how to give anything less than all you had. 

His first thrust knocked Hal forward so hard it was only the other two men grabbing him that kept him from falling on his face on the mattress. It wasn't fair to only give attention to Benedict's hand, so Hal grabbed for Ocelot's and kissed the palm deliriously (laying over his hand, guiding, the cacophonic shot and the recoil kicking back and the smell of gunpowder), and when Big Boss wrapped an arm around his waist and pulled him into it hard and sharp, he forgot it wasn't metal and bit down. 

“S, sorry-” he gasped with the air Big Boss let him pull. 

“Harder than _that_ ,” said Ocelot, invitingly. It was a strange moment to notice that hooded eyes and the long white hair made him look less like a cowboy and more like a wizard out of an old paperback illustration.

Big Boss rocked into him, and that bite was hard enough to leave a mark along the top of Ocelot's index finger. 

He made more sense by feel than by sight. It was Ocelot's fingers Hal sucked on and face he stared into and Benedict's hand that braced him by the shoulder, but Big Boss that his body drank in. Hal had always thought of his body as a thing his brain used to get around, a case that delivered tactile data, not something that acted and wanted and had joy all on its own. When Big Boss filled him he moved back, hungry and shameless, and it was a him he'd never met before. The throaty exhale of satisfaction by his ear was the highest praise he'd ever heard. 

Big Boss pulled out of him and practically tossed him in Benedict's arms. The flesh one caught him up against his chest and the metal one held him steady.

“Your turn,” Big Boss said.

A slow smile spread over Benedict's lips. “Hey there,” he said. 

“Hey,” Hal breathed. 

He braced himself, but the Hell Master, it turned out, took his time. He put Hal on his back and bent him nearly in half. The stretch was a little odd but felt good. Not half as good, though, as Benedict's cock sinking inside of him. Hal's hands fell onto the bed and his fingers fell open. His eyes fell closed, but he could tell it was Big Boss kissing the left wrist and Ocelot at the right, thanks to the difference in facial hair tickling his skin. 

Benedict went easier than Big Boss, but he was thorough. He rocked in with long strokes, tip to root and back again, until Hal was panting and lifting his hips in urgency. Without breaking rhythm Benedict turned his head to meet Big Boss in a kiss, and that was another thing the back of your mind assumed without ever being able to picture. 

“Miller likes to pretend he's above it all,” Ocelot murmured in Hal's ear, “but just like the rest of us, he belongs to the Boss.” 

Benedict must have been able to hear that, because his pace picked up and both of Hal's hands grabbed onto the nearest man. 

“How's that?” Benedict said, between sharp breaths.

Hal's vision was jouncing hard, but he caught Ocelot's sardonic twist to his mouth when he said, “Don't fish for compliments, Miller.” 

“Nice,” Hal panted. “Really nice.” 

His mind couldn't hold onto any one thing, any more than his grabbing hand could grasp all the way around Big Boss's wrist. The way the lights gleamed soft off Benedict's skin and sharp off his left arm. The brush of Ocelot's mustache as he kissed his forearm. How it felt like the three of them were supporting him more than gravity. How his own cries were as steady as the rhythm of Benedict's body into him until Big Boss crashed over him and swallowed his voice up in a kiss. Hal was concentrating more than anything on that and on the fascinating way Benedict's angle shifted slightly every time when he came with a sharp shock of pleasure right to his brainstem, and it was more of a surprise to him than anyone. 

“S, sorry,” he managed, profoundly embarrassed. “I-” 

“All right,” said Big Boss, “That's the warm-up taken care of.” 

He trailed his fingers through the mess on Hal's stomach, looked meditative, then grabbed Benedict. Benedict's pale eyes widened, but he must have been used to it, because he grabbed right back and kissed him. Ocelot braced a hand in the middle of Hal's chest as he leaned over to take his own kiss from Benedict, right above Hal's wide eyes.

“I thought you two hated each other,” he said hazily.

Ocelot only wore an indefinable expression that was at least partially amused, and a little melancholy. “Hate can be complicated.”

“You would never make anything easy,” said Benedict. 

“Easy's boring,” said Big Boss, and pulled Benedict over to him by the metal arm. 

A second ago, Hal would have said he wasn't going to be able to move at all for a while. Somewhere he found the energy to get up on his elbows to watch the commander ride their boss. The wrong side of Big Boss face was toward him; he couldn't see his eye, so instead the rest of his face told the story in how how his chin lifted, and how his adam's apple swayed. He was gripping the commander by the hips and pulling him onto him, while Miller's ass flexed and his head tilted to spill blond hair down his back, and the muscles of his thigh and calf were hypnotizing all in themselves, right down to where the prosthetic made small movements against the sheets to keep his balance. 

“His toes curl,” Hal said softly, in awe. The folding metal made a tiny _click_. 

“You have an eye for detail, doctor,” said Ocelot, whose hand was on Hal's shoulder and whose eyes never looked away from the commander and the boss. His fingertips ran over Hal's skin, light enough that you couldn't suppress the instinct to push back against them to get something solid. 

Benedict arched his back and let out a long, whispery sigh. When his eyes were closed you could only remember they were pale. Big Boss's forehead was creased above the patch, and his fingers dug into Benedict's skin. There was only his body to judge from, not his eye, but there wasn't much it could have added to the secrets in the soft noises he breathed. 

Maybe that was why people gave Big Boss so much dedication; he gave it back.

Hal couldn't say when it was he realized he was trying to pull Ocelot on top of him, or that he was hard again. 

Ocelot turned a kiss to his shoulder into dragging his teeth along his skin, and this time it was the back of his own hand that Hal bit to muffle his noise. 

“Don't worry about keeping quiet,” Big Boss said, with only a grunted rhythm in his inflection to give away how he was talking while his cock was sliding in and out of the commander. “Nobody can hear screaming from in here.” 

“That's not what you call reassuring, Boss,” said Benedict. The musculature of his body all flexed in turn as he rocked into the boss's thrusts. Even when he was on his back, the power in the Boss's body was something to be reckoned with.

“He doesn't need it,” said Ocelot. He caught Hal in his eyes, and you never noticed the color until you were up close. “He's not afraid. Are you, Hal?” 

“No,” Hal said, surprised by how it was true. The earlier nerves were gone, leaving him sensitized and curious, and with heat drifting through his stomach. Being here woke up a daring he didn't know he had. Something crazy was already happening; it wasn't as though anything could make it crazier. Funny how freeing that was. The way Big Boss and the commander were rocking the bed and setting a pace of sharp gasps have him the courage to give a flickering smile, move his hand along Ocelot's forearm, and say, “Are you going next?” 

It turned out to be a perfect situation for observing contrasts. He'd seen before that Big Boss was rough and relentless, where Benedict was smooth and artful. 

Ocelot made you beg. 

His hair hung down and tickled Hal's face and chest as it swung with the sway of his body. His cock filled Hal up slowly, and it wasn't until he'd found himself wrapping his legs around Ocelot and seen him smirk that Hal realized he wasn't going to go any faster. 

“H, hey,” Hal said, and swallowed. “C'mon.” 

Benedict looked over from where he was getting fucked himself and didn't look surprised. “Don't tease the boy, Ocelot.”

“When it's your turn,” Ocelot said, with breath that touched Hal's shoulder and his arms caging him to either side, “you can fuck him however you like.” 

Hal's palm pulled against Ocelot's back and he said, “Please.” 

Once he started saying it, he couldn't seem to stop. First quiet and then louder, and in between yelps he couldn't focus enough to be embarrassed by. He grabbed onto Ocelot's shoulders, where the bones were ridges beneath his palms and that long hair swept over Hal's hands and wrists. He looked different with his hair down, and his eyes hooded. He looked different once you'd seen how he kissed the boss. He went just slow enough that it was never safe to stop begging in case he'd stop, but he kept going even when Big Boss's hand reached over and grasped his calf. 

“Ready for another taste, Boss?” Ocelot said. 

“It's not fair to keep you all to myself, is it,” said Benedict. 

His metal hand was in the center of Big Boss's chest, between the curves of the snaking scar, and at his shoulder there was a vivid contrast where the still silver met the working muscle. He dismounted the boss like a gymnast.

Ocelot leaned back, and the change in angle started out a cry that knocked into another octave when Big Boss bent down and put his lips around Hal's cock, and this wasn't what Ocelot meant when he said his most dangerous part was his mouth but oh god it should have been. 

“You know what they say about guys who like cigars that much,” said Benedict, sitting up with his back against the headboard, with color high in his bare face and his hair pressed to nests of strange angles. 

Hal whimpered in response and dug his hands through the boss's hair. The sudden texture of the eyepatch strap was startling, and Hal must have knocked it askew, because when he looked down at Big Boss, the mundane reflexive way he straightened it was the only part of what he was doing that belonged in reality. He made low, considering noises, halfway like exertion and halfway like someone in deep thought. 

A metal arm reached across Hal's field of view and beckoned, and Ocelot took it and climbed over Big Boss's legs as he worked, stroking a hand down his back on the way. Hal watched him take a place in Benedict's lap, and saw the lines around Benedict's eyes deepene when Ocelot sank himself down on his cock in a quick, businesslike motion. That, Hal thought dizzily, was an old cowboy with amazing thighs. He only looked away when the heat of Big Boss's mouth pulled away from his cock and didn't come back. He was halfway through gathering his mind together enough to complain when Big Boss's face was nestled by his neck and his cock was in him again and there it all went scattering. 

Hal had thought he wasn't holding back before. 

Now every thrust smacked him right into the headboard, and Hal just hung on and right now if there was ordinance under the bed he didn't even care. Big Boss's breath was on his throat, and Benedict's left hand reached out and grasped Hal's shoulder while his right was splayed out on the small of Ocelot's back, silver over skin. He needed all the bracing he could get with Big Boss's cock driving into him.

That no one could hear screaming from in here turned out to be a real good thing to know. 

Then Hal lost any cohesive thread of what was going on and just absorbed pleasure into his overloaded senses. Big Boss's face was buried in his neck with his beard scraping his skin. Big Boss was driving him right up against Benedict's shoulder, which was so thick with muscle it wasn't much softer than the metal one, and Ocelot's calf was along his thigh, and he was reaching out for all of them and touching all he could, because this was the time and the place to be greedy.

Then Big Boss was turning and lifting him, and he felt his back strike a chest that must have been Benedict's because one of the arms that wrapped around his stomach was metal and he was holding him for Ocelot, and before he knew it Ocelot was returning the favor. It was all pieces, then; Ocelot's hand firm on his stomach keeping him steady for Benedict's cock and his voice in Hal's ear in words he couldn't process as anything more than a rumble like the shudder of train tracks, Benedict's sly smile and his pale eyes with the crow's feet at the edges deepening when his eyes lidded and his lips parted, Big Boss on his knees stroking his cock like it was all a show just for him. 

Their faces looked so different up close. Hal couldn't decide if Ocelot's eyes were green or gray but he knew how the corners tightened with amusement when even when he was snapping his hips into him he teased him by staying just out of range for a kiss, until Hal grabbed him and dug his fingers into his hair to pull him down because there was no way he was going to find the breath to ask. Benedict's eyes were a pale ice blue like he'd never seen before, but there was no mistaking he saw clear, and he gave his kisses generously. Big Boss's face was all the contrast between his one eye and the black patch, and how both parts were so human it knocked your breath away, and he kissed as bold as cracking a safe. 

The strangest things stuck in your head when you stopped thinking in words, and moments of vivid image stood out in the middle of the blur. Like the weight of Big Boss's cock in his hand, and how he won a grunt from him and a man like that responding to something Hal did was incomprehensible. Like how the scar on Big Boss's arm moved with the muscle when he reached out for Ocelot, or how Ocelot muttered _boss_ over and over like it was the only thing he knew, or how Benedict was so vocal but when he came the sound he made in Hal's ear was a soft, throaty sigh.

Then it was Big Boss who was fucking him but all of their hands were on him, the metal one and the unexpectedly fine-fingered ones and the ones that were all callus and scar. It was Big Boss's hips against his ass and Ocelot's hand around his cock and Benedict's lips on his, and it was Benedict's mouth that swallowed his cry but all of them in pieces that he came for, wracking his whole body and knocking his brain white. He felt his body jerking against the cage of theirs like it was someone else's he was borrowing. It was all of them who caught him. Big Boss jerked against him, and a splash of wet heat hit his stomach from the other direction, and he watched how Ocelot's eyes were locked on Big Boss, with Hal caught between.

The quiet was sudden. Just them catching their breath.

Not having his glasses didn't matter, he thought fuzzily. He wasn't going to see straight for a while anyway.

Hal wasn't sure if he counted as a vertebrate anymore. He felt gelatinous, like he was molded between all of them, melted into the concave places. He was distantly aware that it was hot and sticky and that he'd never felt this good in his life. 

“Did we kill him?” Big Boss's voice rumbled. 

“Mnh,” Hal managed, muffled against Ocelot's chest. 

Benedict's hand lifted his wrist. “Still got a pulse, boss.” 

“He may not be walking straight for a while,” said Ocelot. 

Oh god. Hal could barely imagine ever walking again. 

“He doesn't have anywhere else he needs to be,” said Big Boss. His arm was slung over Hal's chest, heavy and hairy, with his hand tangled up in Benedict's hair. There couldn't be many places in the world more secure. 

It really was strange. _Larger than life_ was the phrase people used to describe somebody like Big Boss, but really, he was exactly the right size. A guy who they said had once tossed a smoke grenade in the back seat of a Jeep and driven straight through an enemy base was the one whose scar felt like a thread stuck to his skin to Hal's fingertips, and who was breathing against his shoulder right now. The hardest thing to believe about him was that he made sense. 

His eyes wandered to the bedside table, and in the weird clarity of exhaustion, the familiar shape of a bottle there clicked home. 

“ _That's_ why you smell familiar,” he said, satisfied in having a mystery solved. His voice sounded raw and strange to himself after all that screaming. “That's the cologne R &D makes.” 

“He picked it.” Big Boss gestured with his thumb at Benedict. “Makes no difference to me. No sense of smell.” 

“Really?” Hal said, with real surprise. He tried to push himself up on his elbows and realized what a bad idea that was when he went dizzy. Benedict's metal hand steadied him. It was good and warm by now. 

“Is it that weird?” Big Boss said. His one eye looked sleepy and amused. 

“It's just, I think that's the only thing of yours that I've never heard any rumors about.”

There were rumors about everything, right down to the bottoms of his feet. _(“They're the only place where he's vulnerable.” “What? No, dumbass, not that sole, S-O-U-L. It's not physical, it's about how he still has a heart and shit.” “You're the dumbass, dumbass. It's an Achilles' heel kind of thing. Don't you know the classics? It's always about the feet.” “This is what happens when you guys keep voting for Quentin Tarantino on movie night.”)_

Hal glanced down at Big Boss's legs which were entwined with Ocelot's and didn't look any more or less invincible than the rest of him.

“There are rumors about you too, you know,” said Ocelot. 

“Me?” 

On the other side of Hal, Benedict smiled distantly. His pale eyes were half-closed. “All kinds of them.” 

“You can turn invisible,” said Big Boss. 

“You designed a tranq dart that can take down anyone in one shot and never overdose,” said Ocelot. 

“You took an engine apart when you were seven years old,” said Benedict. 

Big Boss's eye was closing. “You were a child mech pilot, and a robot has your mother's soul.” 

“Boss,” Benedict said, with a warning edge to his voice. Big Boss's hand must have been pulling on his hair.

Hal laughed. “Okay, that one's just a Japanese anime.”

Ocelot said, “A what?” 

Hal's face was half-buried in the pillow as he said, “You know, animation.” 

Benedict said, “You might like it. Japanese media is more influential than you'd think. Half of your favorite Westerns are modeled straight from Akira Kurosawa's films.” 

Ocelot snorted. “You know it's the other way around. The entire plot of Yojimbo was stolen from A Fistful of Dollars.” 

“What? That came out three years _after-_ ”

Big Boss said, “I'm not hearing the Kurosawa argument again.” 

“He says that,” Benedict confided, “because I always win.” 

“Speaking of,” Big Boss said, “who won your competition?” 

Hal wasn't sure what he meant, but was yawning too much to get around to asking. 

Ocelot said, “It was a team effort in the end.”

(Later, when Benedict took him out into the woods and the pride of finally successfully getting a fire started with steel wool had made him brave, Hal would ask, “How did you end up with the boss?” 

It wasn't impossible to see the paleness of his eyes behind his sunglasses once you knew what you were looking for. “Do you mean with him or _with_ him?” he said, and crouched to stir the fire. 

“The- well, the second one.” 

His balance didn't waver at all. Hal could picture the tiny adjustments that must have been going on inside his artificial ankle to compliment the real one. 

“We'd been old friends, but we had a falling out. We didn't talk much for a while, even after he had this arm and leg made for me. But we still had to work together, and FOXHOUND's too small a world to avoid each other for long. Ocelot kept having to play go-between.” He made an amused sound under his breath. “I'm surprised he put up with it for as long as he did. One time Ocelot made a mistake on the intel budget numbers and I couldn't get ahold of him, so I had to go take it up with the boss myself. Once we got talking, it turned into just what I'd been afraid of.”

The scent of smoke made Hal rub his nose. “You got in a fight.” 

“I remembered why I loved him and what I was here for. Then we went out in the woods for a while, and talked about old times.” He stood up, and his sunglasses and smile glittered in the sun. “Enough about that. There's plenty of other things to show you while we're out here.” 

Hal scratched at the stubble on his neck. “I really should be getting back to work.” 

“If Baker has any problems he can take it up with me.” He shaded his eyes to look out at the horizon. “Did you know some kinds of tree bark are edible?”) 

Here and now, on the big, soft bed, sweat was cooling on Hal's skin. His breathing was turning long and even, and he was tired in a way that sunk down and made his bones heavy. The mattress shifted as Benedict turned over and Big Boss resettled his arm across him.

“Same bed, different dreams,” Benedict murmured, while Ocelot was muttering something about ice. 

Big Boss said, “You think there's a gas leak?” 

That was about all Hal caught before he drifted off. This was one thing he knew would never end up a rumor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Believe that it's finished. Thank you for reading this whole ridiculous thing! [There may be some relevant posts at my tumblr](https://higharollakockamamie.tumblr.com).


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